"Jack Williamson - The Firefly Tree" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

His mother had no money for that.
"I'll just take him home," she said, "and hope he gets better."
A police car was parked in front of the house when they got there. His father sat in the back,
behind a metal grill. His head was bent. He wouldn't look up, not even when his mother called
through a half-open window.
The police had more cars parked around the garden. They had chopped down all the money
trees and thrown them into a pile. The firefly tree lay on top. Its fragrance was lost in a reek of
kerosene. The policemen made everybody move upwind and set the fire with a hissing blowtorch.
It spread slowly at first, then blazed so high they had to move farther away. Feeling sick at
his stomach, he saw the branches of the tree twist and beat against the flames. He heard a long
sharp scream. A cat caught in the fire, the policemen said, but he knew it wasn't a cat. Fireflies
swarmed out of the thrashing branches and exploded like tiny bombs when the flames caught
them.
His father was crying when the police took him away, along with a bundle of the money
trees for evidence. His mother moved them back to the city. In school again, he tried to tell his
new teachers about the fireflies and how they had come to invite the Earth into their great
confederation of stars. The teachers said he had a great imagination and sent him to the school
psychologist.
The psychologist called his mother to come for a conference. They wanted him to forget the
fireflies and do his lessons and look up his old friends again, but he wanted no friends except the
fireflies. He grieved for them and grieved for his father and grieved for all that might have been.



About the author:
Jack Williamson is a living legend in science fiction, who has been writing and publishing
SF since the 1920s, seven decades now, and it looks very much like he might make it to the
eighth. Of all the writers of his era, he is the last to keep writing SF that is part of the living
evolution of the literature today. His classic fantasy novel, Darker Than You Think, originally
published in Unknoum Worlds in the early 1940s is still influential, and his SF classics, including
The Legion of Space and The Humanoids, still drop in and out of print in paperback in a decade
when many newer books by others are gone. This piece appeared in SF Age, which has been
required reading for several years now but in 1997 had its best year yet for science fiction, and is
the first of several from that magazine in this volume. It is about a boy and an alien and is a
moving evocation of wonder in what we might perhaps call the Ray Bradbury tradition.