"Arthur Porges - Movie Show - A Story for Lincon's Birthday" - читать интересную книгу автора (Porges Arthur)

guidebooks, can tell a bird from its outline, color-scheme, wing-patterns, and similar
attributes; only a glimpse is needed. Yet these had me stumped, and I made poor
Joel run the film yet again.

Then, as I watched with new intensity, my heart began to pound wildly. Those
dovelike forms wheeling and finally alighting in the huge elm suggested something so
exciting—and incredible—that I refused to believe my eyes. Joel was gaping at me,
but I didn’t even try to explain—how could I, when I doubted my own senses?

Almost in a daze, I ran out of the house and rushed to the main library. There
I rounded up five of the best, most comprehensive reference books available, even
one with Audubon prints. It wasn’t an easy puzzle to resolve, because I forced
myself to be skeptical, to seek irrefutable evidence. The diagrams, sketches, and
careful descriptions of expert naturalists should have been enough, but if not, a
faded photo showing a lone bird on its perch in a zoo clinched the matter. It
established the truth beyond further question. Fantastic as it must seem, the birds
that clustered in that old elm were passenger pigeons! Once they had swarmed in
uncounted millions throughout the Mississippi Valley, flocks so large they actually
blotted out the sun for hours. But they were massacred for food and sport; the
magnificent forests that fed and sheltered them were destroyed, and the last of the
species died alone, a pathetic little figure in the Cincinnati Zoological Garden, on
September 1, 1914, at the age of twenty-two years.

How Grain caught the trial on film—some kind of Time Machine, apparently;
what a loss!—we’ll never know; and the film itself, incomplete, badly processed,
scorched, and mishandled, is now only the colored blurs you saw. The setting, the
extras, Lincoln himself, those could have been faked, of course, but not the
pigeons—no way!

And looking back on all of it now, I’m not sure which was the more moving,
bringing me closer to tears than I’ve been since I was a child: Lincoln, as he truly
was, or that flock of doomed passenger pigeons circling gracefully to alight on the
branches of an elm tree in Springfield, Illinois, in the summer of 1841.
 ~~~~~~~~
By Arthur Porges

Arthur Porges was born in 1915 and sold his first story in 1951. He gave up
his career as a college math teacher in 195 7 and has gone on to publish
approximately three hundred SF and detective stories. (By his count, his 1953 F&SF
story “The Ruum, “ has been reprinted thirty times.) He notes also that he
contributed a few minor discoveries to the field of mathematics, including a novel
method of encryption. Mr. Porges underwent quadruple bypass heart surgery last
year, but seems to be recovering just fine—he published a story recently in Alfred
Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and has another one due out soon in Cricket
magazine. This new story pays tribute to our sixteenth President, and to things we’ve
lost.