"Michael Kandel - Strange Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kandel Michael)

psychology, not force, against the Öht.
I ran back down. "How can I use psychology when they're not even human?" I picked up the phone
for the answer.
 The voice came from a great distance. The aliens were definitely leaving. "Everybody's human, Mr.
Griffith."
"But wait! How am I supposed to get to this Baranga—"
"Bucaramanga."
"By plane, or what? And who's paying? It costs a bundle to fly to South America."
Only a dial tone.
There was a knock at the door. The mailman again, the same one. He gave a short salute, handed
me another unstamped letter, and dispersed in a poof of reddish brown dust.
The envelope contained a round-trip ticket to Bogota. There was also a note, which said:

Good luck! Hope you can save
your world. We're attaching a
peripheral to you, to assist in the
details. Please remember, for the
sake of all concerned, to keep as
low a profile as possible.

"I don't even know Spanish," I muttered.
The words on the paper vanished and in their place was a cartoon. Tom and Jerry. Tom was
chasing Jerry as usual, but ran on tiptoe—past Spike, the big bulldog asleep in his doghouse. The
bulldog, I guessed, represented those whose attention is best avoided.
The page went blank.
I went and woke Lucille. I told her that the men from outer space were gone.
She blinked. It took her a moment to get her bearings. She propped herself up, shook her head to
clear it. "Maybe we've both gone off the deep end."
"Lucille," I said, pointing to the window. Here was an opportunity to test the deep-end hypothesis.
"Do you see anything out of the ordinary over in that direction?"
She shook her head. She didn't. She looked at me. "What do you see, Wally?"
A hairy potato sitting on the windowsill. The potato, like a dwarf, had a large head and diminutive
arms and legs. Its face, dirt-brown, lumpy, contained a mouth that went from ear to ear (except there
weren't ears) and was twisted, among bristles of beard, sardonically. The small and puffy eyes regarded
me with an evil gloat.
"Nothing much," I said. "A normal hallucination."
She got up, examined my watch, tested the telephone, and opened and closed the refrigerator a
couple of times. "I have to get back to the office," she said at last, still looking around nervously. "Maybe
none of this happened."
But the airplane ticket was entirely real. She called and confirmed the flight.
"What do you think I should do, Lucille?"
"I don't know," she said. "But if we're going to be invaded by alien tourists, and these
Conservationists say it's up to you to keep them away . . . To tell the truth, Wally dear, I keep thinking
I'm . . ." But she didn't finish. She told me to keep up the medication and left.
I watched her drive off, then went to the dictionary and looked up "peripheral." The definition didn't
help. I had a sinking feeling that soon an awful lot would be expected of me. I had been out in the world
for not even a month, and just the job of being an average person, independent, taking care of myself
from day to day, still seemed, sometimes, more than I could handle.
Also, it disturbed me, my reaction to seeing Lucille asleep on my bed. I was churned up about that,
even with the pill. What kind of ideas was I getting?