"Connie Willis - All Seated on the Ground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

We took them to the Denver Museum of Art and Rocky Mountain
National Park and the Garden of the Gods and a Broncos game. They just
stood there, sending out waves of disapproval.

Dr. Morthman was undeterred. “Tomorrow we’ll take them to the
Denver Zoo.”

“Is that a good idea?” I asked. “I mean, I’d hate to give them ideas,”
but Dr. Morthman didn’t listen.

Luckily, the Altairi didn’t react to anything at the zoo, or to the
Christmas lights at Civic Center or to the Nutcracker ballet. And then we
went to the mall.

****

By that point, the commission had dwindled down to seventeen
people (two of the linguists and the animal psychic had quit), but it was still
a large enough group of observers that the Altairi ran the risk of being
trampled in the crowd. Most of the members, however, had stopped going
on the field trips, saying they were “pursuing alternate lines of research”
that didn’t require direct observation, which meant they couldn’t stand to be
glared at the whole way there and back in the van.

So the day we went to the mall, there were only Dr. Morthman, the
aroma expert Dr. Wakamura, Reverend Thresher, and I. We didn’t even
have any press with us. When the Altairi’d first arrived, they were all over the
TV networks and CNN, but after a few weeks of the aliens doing nothing,
the networks had shifted to showing more exciting scenes from Alien,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Men in Black II, and then completely
lost interest and gone back to Paris Hilton and stranded whales. The only
photographer with us was Leo, the teenager Dr. Morthman had hired to
videotape our outings, and as soon as we got inside the mall, he said, “Do
you think it’d be okay if I ducked out to buy my girlfriend’s Christmas
present before we start filming? I mean, face it, they’re just going to stand
there.”

He was right. The Altairi glide-waddled the length of several stores
and then stopped, glaring impartially at The Sharper Image and Gap
window displays and the crowds who stopped to gawk at the six of them
and who then, intimidated by their expressions, averted their eyes and
hurried on.

The mall was jammed with couples loaded down with shopping bags,
parents pushing strollers, children, and a mob of middle-school girls in
green choir robes apparently waiting to sing. The malls invited school and
church choirs to come and perform this time of year in the food court. The
girls were giggling and chattering, a toddler was shrieking, “I don’t want to!”,
Julie Andrews was singing Joy to the World on the piped-in Muzak, and