"Chad Oliver - Hands Across Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oliver Chad)

"Unfortunately," Copa Paco said aloud.
Dreams were different when they came true. For one thing, the people involved were no longer
dreaming. When they woke up, the monster with ten legs and fetid breath didn't disappear. He was still
there.
The people of Capella IV had gone out into space, trying to find out what sort of a universe they
lived in, trying to find out whether or not they had neighbors.
They had.
The galaxy teemed with life.
But not with "neighbors," unless mere physical proximity was the only criterion of neighborliness.
They found that life took many forms. They found out how different life could be. There was absolutely
no basis for getting together; nothing in common whatsoever. It wasn't that the life-forms were hostile;
hardly. They didn't even have a concept of hostility, or of friendliness. They were different.
Alien.
Isolated.
Twenty-five years ago, they had contacted the Earth. They had found a life-form physically
indistinguishable from themselves, with a fairly similar civilization and a crude form of interplanetary—not
interstellar—travel based on thrust-jet principles. The ships of Capella IV were powered by fields of
negative electricity.
The people of Earth had hydrogen bombs.
The people of Capella IV had force fields and overdrive.

FOR twenty-five years, the two peoples had surveyed each other, discussed each other, sparred
with each other. They had exchanged radio telephotographs and information. They had probed and
speculated. They had wondered and guessed. For twenty-five years.
Of course, they were afraid of each other. The people from Capella IV were afraid of the bomb,
which they didn't have. The people from Earth were afraid of the overdrive, which they didn't have, and
which meant that the Capella ships could attack the Earth, and then retreat to the stars where they could
not be followed.
Both were afraid of each other, because they weren't sure they understood each other.
Espionage through scientific means had given each world much information about the other.
They had never met, face to face. Until now.




COPA PACO stared glumly at his cold pipe, which had gone out again. He tapped the refuse into
the vaporizer and put the pipe away. He stared into the viewscreen, hypnotically.
He could see Earth now, far away.
They had finally decided to take a chance, these two peoples separated by forty-two light-years and
an ocean of emptiness. They had agreed to meet—one man from each planet, unarmed.
It had to be in the system of Sol, of course, because there was no way for the people of Earth to get
to Capella. They had picked a very small, specially constructed chamber on the planet called Mars for
the meeting. Each group had built half of it, and each had inspected it a thousand times. They had taken
turns every 100 Mars days to make certain that no workers of the opposites races ever saw each other
or met on Mars in person.
Ten years had been required for that compromise.
One man from each group, meeting in a tiny room on a neutral planet, a planet without life of its own.
Each man representing cultures separated by a universe and millions of years of independent evolution.
Each man carrying a responsibility almost too fantastic to be real.
If the meeting were a success, there might be a future with boundless possibilities.