"A. R. Yngve - Alien Beach" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yngve A. R)

When the fully clothed woman closed the door behind her, he watched some more TV.
 "The strangest features of the Sirian broadcast is its wondrous clarity and briefness. Even a
child can understand it; the smallest satellite disk on a house is sufficient to receive it. Videotape
and CD copies of the main message, running ninety minutes long until repeated, must already
exist in millions of households all over the world.
"The broadcast has been on the air only since yesterday, and already many viewers have
asked us: isn’t ninety minutes too much of a coincidence? How come the alien solar-sail wasn’t
detected long before? Wouldn’t this and other odd things indicate that the broadcast is a fraud? At
a closer look, there are elements in its narrative structure which seem inspired by 1950s’ TV
shows and broadcast films. Strange as this may seem, it is not overly strange - since the
extraterrestrials claim to have had their sights set on Earth when they picked up and decoded our
early wide-band broadcasts. Being more advanced, and encountering their first messages from
our emerging technological civilization, they responded in kind…in both NTSC and PAL signals.
"Long will future generations of humans watch that historical first broadcast over and over:
moving, somewhat jerky black-and-white photographic pictures, accompanied by written, clumsy
English subtexts and simple sign language, carrying the Sirians' intent to mankind. And they will
reminisce how with it, the fantastic suddenly became mundane; alien visitors from space became
a daily chatting topic, like Iranian missiles or the greenhouse effect..."
The pundits were already turning the event into an excuse for endless media navel-gazing.
Painstakingly, the soldier got up from bed and stumbled into the shower. Amphibians from space,
he thought. Bet they don't have to take showers. Bet they don't feel dirty, foul, exhausted all the
time.
The soldier cried as he thought so, but he stayed in the shower to escape seeing or feeling
the tears on his face. A while later, when the sun stood at the zenith, the soldier left his hotel-room
and went out into the bustling city. Situated on an island off the coast of the Persian Gulf, this
garrison town was something of a freezone in the Arab world. Here were bars which served
alcohol to infidel soldiers - though not as many bars nor infidels for the past few years, since
terrorists had started putting pressure on Filipino barmaids to hide their legs and arms from sight.
He brought a Walkman radio with him, so that he could follow any further news about the Sirians.
Resting the small headphones around his neck, he cranked up the volume to hear it over the
prayer-calls. Above the city, the tall, newly-built minarets spread their wailing, two-note message
through loudspeakers: "God is greater... there is no god but God..." The soldier suppressed a
smile of sudden ironic insight. He thought: A call from the sky. Looks like the competition is
thickening, God. What will all these people think, they who go on pilgrimage to kiss a rock that fell
from space, ages ago? Would they kiss an alien spaceship too?
The soldier wandered into the street-corner café near his hotel. Earlier, the regular Arab
customers used to give him hostile looks - after all, he still wore some of his old uniform - but after
a few months they had gotten used to the brooding foreigner. This morning, the soldier was almost
completely ignored; the men inside were caught up watching the TV set above the counter.
Unsurprisingly, they were watching CNN as well. The soldier overheard bits of the conversation,
and though his Arabic was shaky he understood them well:
"They look almost human."
"They're amphibians, they say."
"Imagine. Like a National Geographic team from space!"
"What if they bring disease with them?"
"I'm not afraid."
"Yes you are. We all are."
"We've got missiles too, don't we? And the Iranians, and the Israelis too... they could come
to good use after all."