"Foster, Alan Dean - Alien Nation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

interminably on the overhead screen.
In the interval, Crais had once more been replaced, this time by a woman
in her mid-forties. She was standing on the front porch of a house with
the sun shining heavily behind her. A dog ran through the picture in the
background, chased by a boy of eight. Fedorchuk wondered cynically if
both boy and dog had been acquired from Central Casting, or if they
actually belonged to the woman smiling at the camera. Probably a second
assistant director was standing somewhere offscreen left, tempting the
dog with a steak and the boy with a fiver.
The detective downed the rest of his drink and left the empty glass where
the bartender would see it. The tender here knew him and his partner
well. The glass would magically refill without him having to make a
request.
"When the Newcomers were first let out of their ship," the woman was
saying, "they were quarantined in a camp not ten miles from the town
here. " She smiled. An uncoached smile, Fedorchuk decided, feeling a
little better about Duncan Crais and his crew. "You can imagine how the
people around here felt about that. But once they were processed and
studied by the scientists and finally released from the
 7

camp and we got a chance to know them, we saw what nice, quiet people they
really are."
Someone nearer the TV muttered something coarse. A couple of other patrons
laughed. The man who'd spoken rose and fumbled with the channel buttons for
a moment. A half-hearted cheer went up as another news program filled the
screen. It wasn't the scores, but it was less boring.
Fedorchuk looked back down at his glass. Sure enough, when he wasn't
looking it had acquired another inch of pale golden liquid and two fresh
ice cubes. His lips frozen in a perpetual thin smile of servitude and
understanding, the bartender nodded once in Fedorchuk's direction. The
detective smiled thankfully in return.
The bartender ignored the hulking figure hard at work behind him. The
busboy was like all the rest of the Newcomers: massive, humanoid, difficult
to tell from a normal human being at first glance except for his size. Only
when he turned did the telltale marking pattern on his bald skull and the
absence of external ears become apparent. He could have crushed the
bartender with a single false step, but instead the alien functioned
smoothly around him, always giving ground when it was contested, always
making way. He held two full racks of beer glasses without strain.
Fedorchuk called out to him.
"Hey, Henry!" All the Newcomers had been assigned human names when it was
found that their own varied from the difficult to the unpronounceable. They
accepted their new names with the same equanimity as they had accepted
their fate at being cast upon a world they had not been designed to live
upon. The shipwrecked do not debate the declarations of the natives.
"How you doin' tonight?" Fedorchuk continued. "Workin' hard? Work like that
can be a pain, y'know."
Expressionless but aware he was being addressed, the Newcomer named Henry
turned slowly. His face was almost as human as Fedorchuk's, which was not