"A. E. Van Vogt - The Wizard of Linn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Vogt A E)

THE WIZARD OF LINN
A. E. Van Vogt

A note on the edition: The text of the story here is that of the original magazine editions first
published in Astounding Science Fiction, not the later versions which A. E. van Vogt reworked
for various novelizations.

"The Wizard of Linn" was first published in Astounding Science Fiction in a three-part serial,
April-June, 1950.

PREFACE
The Golden Age of SF is universally dated from the July 1939, issue of Astounding because that's when
"Black Destroyer," A. E. van Vogt's first SF story, appeared. Isaac Asimov's first story also appeared in
the same month but nobody—as Asimov himself admits—noticed it.

People noticed "Black Destroyer," though, and they continued to notice the many other stories that van
Vogt wrote over the following decade. With the encouragement and occasionally the direction of John
W. Campbell, Heinlein, deCamp, Hubbard, Asimov, and van Vogt together created the Golden Age of
SF.

Each of those great writers was unique. What as much as anything set van Vogt off from other SF writers
(of his day and later) was the ability to suggest vastness beyond comprehension. He worked with not
only in space and time, but with the mind.

Van Vogt knew that to describe the indescribable would have been to make it ludicrous, and that at best
description turns the inconceivable into the pedestrian. More than any other SF writer, van Vogt
succeeded in creating a sense of wonder in his readers by hinting at the shadowed immensities beyond
the walls of human perception. What we've tried to do in our selections for Transgalactic is show some
of van Vogt's skill and range; but we too can only hint at the wonders of the unglimpsed whole.

Eric Flint and Dave Drake 2005

The Wizard of Linn
1
In the deceptive darkness of space, the alien ship moved with only an occasional glint of reflected sunlight
to show its presence. It paused for many months to study the moons of Jupiter, and the Risscreatures
aboard neither concealed the presence of their ship, nor made a particular display of it or of themselves.

A score of times, Riss exploring parties ran into human beings. Their policy on such occasions was
invariable. They killed every human who saw them. Once, on remote Titan, the hilly nature of the terrain
with its innumerable caves enabled a man to evade the net they spread for him. That night, after he had
had ample time to reach the nearest village, an atomic bomb engulfed the entire area.

For what it was worth, the policy paid off. Despite the casual way their ship flew over towns and villages,
only the vaguest reports of the presence of a big ship were spread. And for long no one suspected that
the ship was not occupied by human beings.

Their precautions could not alter the natural order of life and death. Some hours out of Titan, a Riss
workman who was repairing a minor break in an instrument on the outer skin of the spaceship, was
struck by a meteor. By an immense coincidence, the flying object was moving in the same direction as the