"Gordon R. Dickson - The Alien Way" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

hum of the insects in his dream blended with the hum of the
air-conditioner in his bedroom window, and in the window of his living
room beyond. The whole dark, brickwalled apartment in the stifling,
rainy June night was a cool cave of isolation set off from the
unsleeping, night-time streets of Washington, D.C., outside, where the
cabs rolled all night long over the glistening asphalt, past the traffic
signals and the neon signs of restaurants.

In the sleeping apartment, nothing moved. The air-conditioners hummed.
The bedroom was shadowy. The distant light of a street lamp glowed
faintly through the drawn blinds and touched the opposite wall beyond
the bed with two ghostly faint rectangles of light. They seemed on the
verge of merging, so uncertain they were, and pale.



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Jase's clothes lay lumped on the chair by the bed. The carpet beneath
the chair was a plane of darkness, reaching toward the open doorway and
through it into the larger space of the living room. There the walls
were lit by three more ghosts of windows. The light showed bookshelves
and a glass case crammed full of the study skins of small animal
specimens, carefully sewn, preserved with borax, and tagged. The number
of them piled in the case made them look like a horde of prisoners. Pent
by the invisible glass walls as the bears were pent by invisible
instinct and desire. On the bookshelves, filling the walls of the room
from floor to ceiling, the faint light through the blinds barely showed
some of the titles: P. Chapin, Preparation of Bird Skins for Study; H.
Hediger, Wildgere in Gefangenschaft; K. P. Schmidt, Corollary and
Commentary for Climate and Evolution, magazine pages extracted and
bound; W. K. Gregory, Evolution Emerging ....

On the desk full of papers the still-uncashed last paycheck made out to
Jason S. Barchar by the newly formed Wildlife Studies Section of the
U.S. Department of the Interior lay shadowy and still. It was a
half-paycheck, since Jase had been on sabbatical leave the last two
months. Under the check was a birthday card two weeks old on which was
scribbled, "With no apologies whatever to A. A. Milne-Hippy Pappy
Bithunday, love, Mele."

Isolated, dark, the apartment slumbered-all but the receiver, the ,tiny
microdevice implanted under Jase's skull, with its hair-thin wire
reaching into certain areas of his brain. Unsleeping, unisolated, the
receiver reached outward through a tight, invisible channel of collapsed
space to a cold, dark fragment of earth, manufacture, so far distant
that it was just being touched just now by the same sunlight that had
shone on those condemned in the Salem Witch Trials in 1692.