"James Alan Gardner - The Ray-Gun A Love Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

THE RAY-GUN: A LOVE STORY
by James Alan Gardner

James Alan Gardner has published seven SF novels with
Harper-Collins Eos, beginning with Expendable and most recently Radiant.
Eos has also published Jim’s short story collection Gravity Wells. The
author has won the Aurora award twice, and was a finalist for both the Hugo
and Nebula awards with his February 1997 Asimov’s story “Three Hearings
on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream.” After far too long
an absence, we are pleased to welcome him back to our pages with his tale
about the unforeseen repercussions of an incomprehensible alien device.

****

This is a story about a ray-gun. The ray-gun will not be explained except to
say, “It shoots rays.”

They are dangerous rays. If they hit you in the arm, it withers. If they
hit you in the face, you go blind. If they hit you in the heart, you die. These
things must be true, or else it would not be a ray-gun. But it is.

Ray-guns come from space. This one came from the captain of an
alien starship passing through our solar system. The ship stopped to scoop
up hydrogen from the atmosphere of Jupiter. During this refueling process,
the crew mutinied for reasons we cannot comprehend. We will never
comprehend aliens. If someone spent a month explaining alien thoughts to
us, we’d think we understood but we wouldn’t. Our brains only know how to
be human.

Although alien thoughts are beyond us, alien actions may be easy to
grasp. We can understand the “what” if not the “why.” If we saw what
happened inside the alien vessel, we would recognize that the crew tried to
take the captain’s ray-gun and kill him.

There was a fight. The ray-gun went off many times. The starship
exploded.

All this happened many centuries ago, before telescopes. The
people of Earth still wore animal skins. They only knew Jupiter as a dot in
the sky. When the starship exploded, the dot got a tiny bit brighter, then
returned to normal. No one on Earth noticed—not even the shamans who
thought dots in the sky were important.

The ray-gun survived the explosion. A ray-gun must be resilient, or
else it is not a ray-gun. The explosion hurled the ray-gun away from Jupiter
and out into open space.

After thousands of years, the ray-gun reached Earth. It fell from the
sky like a meteor; it grew hot enough to glow, but it didn’t burn up.