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

This is Earth, he repeated. I'm home. I'm safe now. Yet the memory of the flashback frightened him. He had never seen an alien landscape. He had never even set foot on Earth's own moon. But the vision in his mind had been as clear and solid as reality.

He shook his head and turned in the chair, away from the window. He saw that the curves of every monitoring screen had turned fiercely red and jagged. He took a deep breath and wijled his heart to slow back to normal. The sensor traces smoothed and returned to their usual soft green color.

A portion of the solid wall between the bureau and the bank of electronic equipment glowed briefly and vanished, creating a normal-sized doorway. Through it stepped a smiling man. Behind him the wall re-formed itself, as solid as it had been originally.

"Good morning," said the man. "I'm Gene Richards."

Stoner got to his feet and stretched out his hand. "You must be a psychiatrist, aren't you?"

Richards's smile remained fixed, but his eyes narrowed a trifle. "A good guess. An excellent guess."

He was a small man, slight, almost frail. Thick curly reddish-brown hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. Thin face with small bright probing eyes and strong white teeth that seemed a size too large for his narrow jaw. He looked almost rodentlike. He wore a casual, brightly flowered shirt over denim shorts. His feet were shod in leather sandals.

Stoner dropped back into his chair while the psychiatrist pulled one of the plastic chairs from the wall and straddled it backward, next to him.

"Where the hell are we, anyway?" Stoner asked. "Hawaii?"

Richards nodded. "The big island, just outside of Hilo."

"This isn't a hospital, is it? It feels more like some big laboratory complex.''

Again Richards bobbed his head up and down. "Right again. That's three in a row. Want to try for four?"

Stoner laughed softly. "I have no idea of how long I've been--suspended.''

"Eighteen years."

"Eighteen? . . ." Stoner felt the psychiatrist's eyes probing him. Past the man's suddenly intense face, he could see the row of display screens flickering their readout curves.

The silence stretched. Finally Richards asked, "How do you feel about returning from the dead?"

"I thought they'd bring me back a lot sooner than this."

"The alien spacecraft was recovered almost twelve years ago. You've been kept in cryonic suspension until the biotechnicians figured out how to thaw you without killing you."

"And the spacecraft?"

Richards's eyes shifted away slightly. "It's in orbit around the Earth."

"The alien himself . . ."

"He was quite dead. There wasn't a thing anybody could do about that."

Stoner leaned back in the chair and glanced out at the sea again.

"I'm the first man ever to be revived from cryonic suspension?" he asked.

"That's right. The scientists wanted to try some human guinea pigs, but the government wouldn't allow it."