"Edmond Hamilton - The Haunted Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

THE HAUNTED STARS, by
Edmond Hamilton

To


Jack Williamson who
knows the star ways.



A Pyramid Book, published by arrangement with Torquil Press


Pyramid edition: first printing, February
1962

© 1960 by Edmond Hamilton All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

much later, Robert Fairlie was to remember the simple act of boarding the evening plane at Boston
airport as the mo-ment when he first began to move into a new, frightening universe. But at the time, it
seemed to him only a pleasing break in his quiet academic routine.


Right after take-off, he opened the newspaper he had bought in the terminal. He spared only a glance at
the front page, with its headline of SOVIET ACCUSES U.S. OF VIOLATING MOON
AGREEMENT. He was not much in-terested in that continuing controversy—the Russians had been
blustering about something or other ever since World War Two ended, more than twenty years ago. He
went through the inner pages, searching the columns.


“Of course,” he thought a bit self-consciously, “there’s likely to be nothing about me at all. But there
might be.”


There was. But it was only a paragraph buried opposite the woman’s page, and it misspelled his name.
It informed that Doctor Robert Parley, professor of linguistics at Massa-chusetts University and noted
authority on Carian “hiero-glyphics”—he winced at that word—had been called to Washington to assist
the Smithsonian Institution in a matter of philological research.


Not much, Fairlie thought disappointedly. But a news-paper wasn’t very important. There would be
more about ft. in the Journal of Philological Studies. For a young scholar— thirty-three was young, in
his field—it was a thing that would definitely add prestige.


“Chap I met down at the Smithsonian,” he could casually ;
say at faculty meetings, “was telling me .. .” -*;