"Fred Hoyle & John Elliot - A For Andromeda" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoyle Fred)

needling and nagging. All it is, really, is a piece of lab. equipment. Because it's big and costs the earth, it becomes public
property. I don't blame the old man. He's caught up in it. He's stuck his neck out and he's got to show results."
"Well, won't it?"
"I dunno."
"I thought it was your equipment."
"Mine and Dennis Bridger's."
"Where is Dr. Bridger?"
"Down at the alley. Waiting for us with a lane booked, I hope. And a flask."
"You've got one flask."
"What good's one? They're dry, these places."
As they swung down the dark winding road, he started telling her about Bridger and himself. Both had been students at
Birmingham University, and research fellows at the Cavendish. Fleming was a theorist, Bridger a practical man, a development
mathematician and engineer. Bridger was a career scientist; he was set to make the most he could out of his particular line.
Fleming was a pure research man who did not give a damn about anything except the facts. But they both despised the academic
system into which they grew up, and they stuck together. Reinhart had winkled them out, several years ago, to work on his new
telescope. As he was, perhaps, the most distinguished and respected astrophysicist in the western world, and a born leader of
teams and picker of talents, they had gone along with him without hesitation, and he had backed and encouraged and generally
fathered them throughout the long and tortuous business of development.
It was easy to see, when Fleming talked, the mutual trust that tied him to the older man, behind his surliness. Bridger, on the
other hand, was bored and restless. He had done his part. And they had, as Fleming said without modesty or conceit, given the
old boy the most fabulous piece of equipment on earth.
He did not ask about Judy, and she kept quiet. He waited in the bar of the Lion while she went to her room. By the time they
reached the bowling alley he was pretty much the worse for wear.
The bowling alley was a converted cinema, which stood out in a wash of neon and floodlighting against the dark old mill-
town. Its clientele seemed to have come from somewhere other than the cobbled streets. They were mostly young. They wore
jeans and soda-jerks' jackets, crew-cuts, and blouses with slogans on them. It was difficult to imagine them at home in the old
terraced houses, the grimy Yorkshire valleys. Their native voices were drowned under a flood of music and the rumble and
clatter of bowls and skittles on the wooden planking of the lanes. There were half-a-dozen lanes with ten pins at one end of each
and, at the other, a rack of bowls, a scoring table, a bench and a quartet of players. When a bowl pitched down and scored a
strike, an automatic gate picked up the skittles again and returned the bowl to the rack at the players' end. Except in the
concentrated, athletic moment of bowling, the players seemed uninterested in the game, lounging around and talking and
drinking Coca Cola out of bottles. It was more transatlantic than the cinema had been: as though the American way of life had
burst out through the screen and possessed the auditorium. But that, Fleming remarked, was just bloody typical of the way things
are generally.
They found Bridger, a narrow, pointed man about Fleming's age, bowling on a lane with a curvy girl in a vermilion blouse
and tight, bright yellow drainpipes. Her bosom and hair were swept up as high as they would go, her face was made up like a
ballet dancer's, and she moved like something in a Hollywood chorus; but when she opened her mouth all Yorkshire came out of
it. She bowled with a good deal of muscular skill, and came back and leant on Bridger, sucking a finger.
"Ee, I got a bit o' skin off."
"This is Grace." Bridger seemed slightly ashamed of her. He was prematurely lined and nervous, mousily dressed in dull
sports clothes like a post office assistant on Saturday morning. He shook hands tentatively with Judy, and when she said "I've
heard of you," he gave her a quick, anxious look.
"Miss Adamson," said Fleming, pouring some whiskey into Bridger's Coke, "Miss Adamson is our new eager-beaver-lady-
beaver-P.R.O."
"What's your other name, love?" inquired the girl.
"Judy."


7
 "You haven't got a bit of sticking-plaster?"