"2 The Alien Within" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

Jo shot him a glance.

"Tall, I mean."

She suppressed the urge to laugh. He's alive and awake and just like he was all those years ago. I've done it! I've brought him back!

She studied Keith Stoner intently, wordlessly, eyes picking out every detail of the face and body that she had known so intimately eighteen years ago.

Eighteen years, Jo thought. Suddenly her hands flew to her face. Eighteen years! He hasn't aged a moment and I'm eighteen years older.











CHAPTER 3






Stoner searched the drawers of the little bureau and found neat stacks of underwear, shirts, and slacks. No shoes, but several pairs of slipper socks.

Without even bothering to look at the size markings, he pulled on a pair of tan slacks and slipped an open-necked, short-sleeved buff-colored shirt over them. He did not bother with the socks. The floor felt comfortably warm.

Then he went to the window again and sat in the little armchair. The glass was all one piece; there was no way to open the window, and Stoner instinctively knew it would be too tough to shatter, even if he threw the chair at it.

Outside he saw lovely green landscaped grounds, dotted with gracefully swaying palm trees. In the distance, a high-

way busy with traffic, and beyond it a glistening white sand beach and a gentle surf rolling in from the blue ocean.

It did not look like Florida to him. California, possibly. Certainly not Kwajalein.

There were comparatively few automobiles on the highway, but those that Stoner saw looked only a little different from the cars he remembered. A bit lower and sleeker. They still ran on four wheels, from what he could see. He had not been asleep so long that totally new transportation systems had come into being. The trucks looked more changed, shaped more aerodynamically. And their cabs seemed longer, much more roomy than Stoner remembered them. He could not see any sooty fumes belching from them. Nor any diesel exhaust stacks. The trucks seemed to have their own lanes, separated from the automobile traffic by a raised divider.

It was quiet in his room. The highway sounds did not penetrate the window. The glistening bank of equipment that loomed around his shelf bed was barely humming. Stoner could hear himself breathing.

He leaned back in the chair and luxuriated in the pedestrian normality of it. Solid weight. The warmth of the sun shining through the window felt utterly wonderful on his face and bare arms. He watched the combers running up to the beach. The eternal sea, the heartbeat of the planet.

He closed his eyes. And for the briefest instant he saw a different scene, another world, alien yet familiar, vastly different from Earth and yet as intimately known as if he had been born there.

Stoner's eyes snapped open and focused on the enduring sea, unfailingly caressing the land; on the blue sky and stately white clouds adorning it. This is Earth, he told himself. The vision of an alien world faded and disappeared.