"Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Hunters of the Red Moon - 1973" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradley Marion Zimmer)

Reluctantly, Dane Marsh hauled himself up from his lazy perch. Work to be done. The sails were slamming in the first wisps of the oncoming night breeze; he adjusted the jib and the poled-out spinnaker slightly, and set a new tack, then went down to root out some supper. Belowdecks the cabin was stifling in the heat; he had debated taking advantage of the quiet sea to cook something hot, but the steambath effect discouraged him. He opened a packet of rye crackers and a tin of cheese, dumped lemon crystals into drinking water and stirred in sugar, and carried the food and drink on deck, to catch the breeze.

The light lingered long in these latitudes at this time of year, and the sun lingered, low and red on the horizon, making a crimson and scarlet track across the barely moving sea. A tiny crescent of moon, a mere scrap of silver, hung low and dim above the setting sun. High above, a glimmer of the evening star-

_No, Dane Marsh thought incredulously, _it's the same damn light!

He knitted his brows, determined to solve the puzzle. A plane? Hell no; the oldest prop plane would have been miles out of sight-range by now. A jet would have been long gone while he was watching it. Satellite? No; they _move. Weather balloon? Well, _maybe one could drift this far off an inhabited coast, possibly with the wind from Australia, but it would be a real freak.

He bit into his crackers and cheese, watching the strange light which hung, seeming to brighten, in the slowly fading red twilight. It seemed self-luminous, and was now the apparent diameter of a golf ball.

_Some weather phenomenon, no doubt, but one I've never seen in fifteen years spent mostly at sea.

Oh, well, he told himself, if there was one thing you learned at sea, it was that you've always got more to learn. This old world still had plenty of surprises left for people who kept their eyes and ears open, Dane thought, munching at his crackers.

It was getting bigger. Now it was the apparent size of a small dinnerplate, and had elongated somewhat from round to oval.

I _wonder if this is what people are seeing when they report seeing flying saucers-_excuse me-_Unidentified Flying Objects! This was sure as hell some kind of flying object, and it was about as unidentified as he ever saw!

Now he could see that it was definitely solid, although without any idea as to its actual1 distance he could not judge its size. He watched, in growing wonder and wild surmise, as it settled slowly down toward the surface of the water and grew ever greater, greater, more huge and unbelievably contoured.

_Flying saucer? Flying skyscraper, more like it!

It was bigger than an ocean liner; bigger than a tanker.

No plane ever built was this size. _Not even the Russians ...

Fear surged over him. Not, yet, the obvious fear of the great vessel, but-to a man of Dane Marsh's type-a deeper, more compelling fear.

_Have I freaked out? Loneliness does weird things to people. . ..

He fought for calm, setting his teeth and reaching out to grip the familiar mast of the _Seadrift. The smooth white paint he had just renewed two months ago, already specked with the relentless eroding of the salt. His own hand, calloused with handling ropes and spars. His pulse, a little elevated with fright, was still perceptible and pounding steadily away, and his eyes were clear, for when he moved his head and blinked the huge strange _thing had not moved.

_Well, I'm not nuts, anyway. Not dreaming or hallucinating.

_Therefore, even if there isn't any such thing, that thing is definitely there. If I'm seeing it, and there's nothing wrong with my eyes, it must exist.

_And therefore-his breath caught in his throat at the next, inescapable step of his logic-_if no country on Earth has ever built anything remotely like this, it must somehow come from outside.

He discovered that his arms and legs were ridged, in the heat of the tropical sunset, with gooseflesh. _Outside. In one great step, his awareness had transcended the slow steps of scientists toward the stars. _There was something out there.

And it swept over him, with a shuddering thrill. _Did I think there weren't any adventures left?

Hard on the heels of that came a sudden icy fear. All this time, and they had kept their very existence secret; what would happen to him if they happened to notice him watching them? He did not yet believe they were malicious. Why should they be? A spaceship capable of traveling interstellar distances (what strange metal was that hull, pale with a shimmer like a peacock's wing?) would pay no more attention to a little ship like the _Sea-drift than he, Dane Marsh, paid to a flying fish. (But then, what did he do when a flying fish landed on his deck in the morning? Sometimes he threw it back. But if he happened to be hungry, he fried it for breakfast.)

Dane Marsh began, moving swiftly and steadily, to tack his ship to wear around. He was curious, yes, but he'd rather watch from a safer distance. He had no desire to end up in a sort of galactic frying pan.

His arms felt heavy and clumsy as he lifted them to haul on the ropes; then a curious buzzing sound, a tingling, began to ring in his ears. He was possessed with a sense of frantic urgency, but it seemed as if he were wading through a sticky pool of molasses; it was an effort to lift his foot from the deck, and the growing sense of unreality swept him with renewed terror.

_Is this all a hallucination, then? A bad dream turning into a nightmare?