"Murray Leinster - The Wailing Asteroid" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

position right ascension so-and-so, declination such-and-such. The signals began
every seventy-nine minutes. They could be heard by any receiving instrument
capable of handling the microwave frequency involved. The broadcast was
extremely broadband. It covered more than two octaves and sharp tuning was not
necessary. A man-made signal would have been confined to as narrow a wave-band
as possible, to save power for one reason, so it could not be imagined that the
signal was anything but artificial. Yet no Earth science could have sent a
transmitter out so far.
When sunrise arrived at the tracking station on Kalua, it ceased to receive from
space. On the other hand, tracking stations in the United States, the Antilles,
and South America began to pick up the cryptic sounds.
The first released news of the happening was broadcast in the United States. In
the South Pacific and India and the Near East and Europe, the whole matter
seemed too improbable for the notification of the public. News pressure in the
United States, though, is very great. Here the news rated broadcast, and got it.

That was why Joe Burke did not happen to complete the business for which he'd
taken Sandy Lund to a suitable, romantic spot. She was his secretary and the
only permanent employee in the highly individual business he'd begun and
operated. He'd known her all his life, and it seemed to him that for most of it
he'd wanted to marry her. But something had happened to him when he was quite a
small boy--and still happened at intervals--which interposed a mental block.
He'd always wanted to be romantic with her, but there was a matter of two moons
in a strange-starred sky, and trees with foliage like none on Earth, and an
overwhelming emotion. There was no rational explanation for it. There could be
none. Often he'd told himself that Sandy was real and utterly desirable, and
this lunatic repetitive experience was at worst insanity and at the least
delusion. But he'd never been able to do more than stammer when talk between
them went away from matter-of-fact things.
Tonight, though, he'd parked his car where a river sparkled in the moonlight.
There was a scent of pine and arbutus in the air and a faint thread of romantic
music came from his car's radio. He'd brought Sandy here to propose to her. He
was doggedly resolved to break the chains a psychological oddity had tied him up
in.
He cleared his throat. He'd taken Sandy out to dinner, ostensibly to celebrate
the completion of a development job for Interiors, Inc. Burke had started Burke
Development, Inc., some four years out of college when he found he didn't like
working for other people and could work for himself. Its function was to develop
designs and processes for companies too small to have research-and-development
divisions of their own. The latest, now-finished, job was a wall-garden which
those expensive interior decorators, Interiors, Inc., believed might appeal to
the very rich. Burke had made it. It was a hydroponic job. A rich man's house
could have one or more walls which looked like a grassy sward stood on edge,
with occasional small flowers or even fruits growing from its close-clipped
surface. Interiors, Inc., would push the idea of a bomb shelter or in an atomic
submarine where it would cation.{sic}
It was done. A production-job room-wall had been shipped and the check for it
banked. Burke had toyed with the idea that growing vegetation like that might be
useful in a bomb shelter or in an atomic submarine where it would keep the air
fresh indefinitely. But such ideas were for the future. They had nothing to do