"Alien Resonance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

stream, and he wondered how acid the rains had made this calm fraction of the
world he loved.
The rains couldn't be that bad, however. The fish were there. Alec had preceded
him up the brook, but he hadn't caught them all, and Ybarra doubted he had
caught the largest. He had one eleven-incher himself, sharing his creel with his
empty beer can.
A broad stretch of spume-flecked water attracted him. He mounted a boulder,
larger and flatter than its neighbors, and dropped a weighted nymph where the
current would tumble it past the predatory eyes he knew must lie in wait.
A murmur of rapids, muted by the firs and a bend of the stream, drew him on. But
as he turned upstream, a light caught his eye. The light was not one that
belonged in that setting. It reflected cleanly, polished, like metal. His first
thought was for an abandoned can, but he turned anyway. He followed the alien
gleam to a cleft in the shade, and there he saw the egglike mystery.
He did not leave it. He set his rod and creel aside and bent to touch, to rap,
to push. It seemed like opaque glass, resonant and light, but not light enough
to carry easily, nor small enough. He drew it from its niche, startling a small
black salamander, and laid it on the forest mold. He squatted on his heels,
wondering, thinking that its gemlike substance was like nothing he had ever seen
before.
He did not guess that his find was unusual litter, or a lost piece of airplane,
or a bomb. He did not even think that his companions back in camp would be
fascinated by an oddity. He was a scientist, and at the moment he wanted nothing
more than to lug his find back to his campus lab, on foot if need be, the whole
hundred miles, and examine it properly with reagents, diamond saws, and
polishers. He thought that it was precious enough to him as it was, for beauty
and novelty. But it would surely be worth a paper or two as well.



Camp nestled on the shore of a small pond, backed by fir, cedar, and birch. Five
small tents, two red, one blue, and two yellow, barred a crescent beach of
leaf-matted shingle. Two canoes flanked the array, beached on their sides. A
cairn of rock, ringed by stone and log seats, held smoldering coals, a wisp of
smoke lazing into the sky past a blackened aluminum coffee pot. A crusted grill
leaned against the cairn.
An alto sang nonsense syllables from beyond one horn of the crescent beach,
punctuated by splashing sounds. Brush crackled, and onto the beach stepped Diana
Hadden. On the plate she held were five trout. Their offal had gone to feed the
pond's minnows, who would in turn be food for trout and other creatures.
Di was a biologist. She too taught at the university, and she too was treasuring
the ten-day break at the end of the spring term. She too loved woods and waters,
but she did not care for tramping brooks. Her jeans, wet to their thighs, showed
her preference for wading the margins of a pond, casting flies where no boughs
conspired to frustrate her. This afternoon she had been using small streamers,
with such success that she had released more trout than she had kept.
Setting the plate on the table, she looked past the other horn of the crescent,
shaking her head to settle her dark hair out of her gaze. A clatter of stone, a
splash, and she grinned. Franklin Massey, fellow biologist, had gone that way
with Ellen Young, chemist, and by now, fish or no, he must be out of sorts.