"Alan Dean Foster - Taken 03 - Candle Of Distant Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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ALANDEANFOSTERhas written in a variety of genres, including hard science fiction, fantasy, horror,
detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of theNew York Times
bestsellerStar Wars: The Approaching Storm and the popular Pip and Flinx novels, as well as
novelizations of several films includingStar Wars, the first threeAlien films, andAlien Nation. His novel
Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first science fiction work ever to
do so. Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, live in Prescott, Arizona, in a house built of brick that was
salvaged from an early-twentieth-century miners’ brothel. He is currently at work on several new novels
and media projects.




Jeron was very proud of the telescope his parents had given him two birthdays ago. In the time since
then, he had mastered its use and added one accessory after another to the basic unit. He’d spent hours
and days photographing the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, working his way out to those of Uranus and
Neptune as well as distant nebulae and star clusters.

But this morning he was confused. The tiny section of night sky he had set his scope to automatically
scan had come back with an anomaly. It was one of those distant areas of the solar system where nothing
was supposed to exist. Which was precisely why he had been scanning it. Amateur astronomers tended
to find the most interesting things where nothing was supposed to be, and thus where the professionals
did not bother to look.

The sequence of photographs showed a mass of incredibly small objects where none ought to be.
Furthermore, they appeared and disappeared over an all too brief series of sequential images. Present
and gone, far too rapidly to be wandering asteroids, or cometary fragments, or anything else for which he
could think of a reasonable, rational explanation. Despite checking and rechecking his scope and its
attendant devices and finding them in perfect working order, he knew that the objects’ appearance had
to be the result of a functional irregularity. Had to be, because they could not be anything else. He could
just see himself forwarding and reporting to one of the professional organizations that vetted the
thousands of reports turned in by dedicated amateurs such as himself a sighting of a tightly packed cluster
of baffling, inexplicable objects located somewhere in the vicinity of Neptune’s giant moon Triton.

Especially when the number of them totaled thirteen.
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For the eleventh time, Ussakk the Astronomer pored over the most recent collated readouts while trying
to decide how best to kill himself. Whichever method he chose, it would be faster and cleaner than what