"Frank Herbert - The Santaroga Barrier" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

All the valley's businesses, including the bank, were locally owned. They
flatly rejected outside investment money.

Santaroga had successfully resisted every "pork barrel" government project the
politicians had offered. Their State Senator was from Porterville, ten miles
behind Dasein and well outside the valley. Among the political figures Dasein
had interviewed to lay the groundwork for his study, the State Senator was one
of the few who didn't think Santarogans were "a pack of kooks, maybe religious
nuts of some kind."

"Look, Dr. Dasein," he'd said, "all this mystery crap about Santaroga is just
that -- crap."

The Senator was a skinny, intense man with a shock of gray hair and red-veined
eyes. Barstow was his name; one of the old California families.

Barstow's opinion: "Santaroga's a last outpost of American individualism.
They're Yankees, Down Easters living in California. Nothing mysterious about
'em at all. They don't ask special favors and they don't fan my ears with
stupid questions. I wish all my constituents were as straightforward and
honest."

One man's opinion, Dasein thought.

An isolated opinion.

Dasein was down into the valley proper now. The two-lane road leveled into a
passage through gigantic trees. This was the Avenue of the Giants winding
between rows of sequoia gigantea.

There were homes set back in the trees. The datum-data said some of these
homes had been here since the gold rush. The scroll work of carpenter gothic
lined their eaves. Many were three stories high, yellow lights in their
windows.

Dasein grew aware of an absence, a negative fact about the houses he saw: No
television flicker, no cathode living rooms, no walls washed to skimmed-milk
gray by the omnipresent tube.

The road forked ahead of him. An arrow pointed left to "City Center" and two
arrows directed him to the right to "The Santaroga House" and "Jaspers Cheese
Co-op."

Dasein turned right.

His road wound upward beneath an arch: "Santaroga, The Town That Cheese
Built." Presently, it emerged from the redwoods into an oak flat. The Co-op
loomed gray white, bustling with lights and activity behind a chain fence on
his right. Across the road to his left stood Dasein's first goal here, a long
three-storey inn built in the rambling 1900 style with a porch its full