"Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

Ages.

Passing along priority channels, the four photographs came together at the Los
Angeles Area Headquarters of the Moon Project of the U.S. Space Force—the American
Moon Project that was barely abreast of the Russian one, and far behind the Soviet Mars
Project And so at Moon Project U.S. the sense of strangeness and unease was sharpest,
though expressed in sardonic laughter and a bouncy imaginativeness, as is the way with
scientists faced with the weird.

In the end the four photographs—or rather, what they heralded—starkly affected
every human being on Earth, every atom of our planet. They opened deep fissures in the
human soul.

They cost thousands their sanity and millions their lives. They did something to the
moon, too.

So we might begin this story anywhere—with Wolf Loner in the mid-Atlantic, or
Fritz Scher in Germany, or Richard Hillary in Somerset, or Arab Jones smoking weed in
Harlem, or Barbara Katz sneaking around Palm Beach in a black playsuit, or Sally Harris
hunting her excitement in the environs of New York, or Doc Brecht selling pianos in
L.A., or Charlie Fulby lecturing about flying saucers, or General Spike Stevens
understudying the top role in the U.S. Space Force, or Rama Joan Huntington
interpreting Buddhism, or with Bagong hung in the South China Sea, or with Don
Merriam at Moonbase U.S., or even with Tigran Biryuzov orbiting Mars. Or we could
begin it with Tigerishka or Miaow or Ragnarok or the President of the United States. But
because they were close to that first center of unease near Los Angeles, and because of
the crucial part they were to play in the story, we will begin with Paul Hagbolt, a
publicist employed by Project Moon; and with Margo Gelhorn, fiancée of one of the four
young Americans who had soared to Moonbase U.S., and with Margo's cat Miaow, who
had a very strange journey ahead of her; and with the four photographs, though they
were then only an eerie, top-secret mystery rather than a trumpeting menace; and with
the moon, which was about to slide into the ambiguous gleam-haunted darkness of
eclipse.
Margo Gelhorn, coming out on the lawn, saw the full moon halfway up the sky. Earth's
satellite was as vividly three-dimensional as a mottled marble basketball. Its pale gold
hue fitted the weather rarity of a balmy Pacific Coast evening.

"There's the bitch up there now," Margo said.

Paul Hagbolt, emerging through the door behind her, laughed uneasily. "You really
do think of the moon as a rival."

"Rival, hell. She's got Don," the blonde girl said flatly. "She's even got Miaow here
hypnotized." She was holding in her arms a tranquil gray cat, in whose green eyes the
moon was two smudged pearls.

Paul too turned his gaze on the moon, or rather toward a point near its top, above
the Mare Imbrium shadow. He couldn't distinguish the crater Plato holding Moonbase
U.S., but he knew it was in view.