Robert Silverberg - Amanda and the Alien

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 31.91KB 8 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Robert%20Silverberg%20-%20Amanda%20and%20the%20Alien.txt

Version 1.0 dtd 040700

AMANDA AND THE ALIEN

By Robert Silverberg

Amanda spotted the alien late Friday afternoon outside the Video Center, on South Main. It was

trying to look cool and laid-back, but it simply came across as bewildered and uneasy. The alien

was disguised as a seventeen year-old girl, maybe a Chicana, with olive-toned skin and hair so

black it seemed almost blue, but Amanda, who was seventeen herself, knew a phony when she saw one.

She studied the alien for some moments from the other side of the street to make absolutely

certain. Then she walked over.

"You're doing it wrong," Amanda said. "Anybody with half a brain could tell what you really are."

"Bug off," the alien said.

"No. Listen to me. You want to stay out of the detention center, or don't you?"

The alien stared coldly at Amanda and said, "I don't know what the crap you're talking about."

"Sure you do. No sense trying to bluff me. Look, I want

to help you," Amanda said. "I think you're getting a raw deal. You know what that means, a raw

deal? Hey, look, come home with me, and I'll teach you a few things about passing for human. I've

got the whole friggin' weekend now with nothing else to do anyway"

A flicker of interest came into the other girl's dark, chilly eyes. But it died quickly, and she

said, "You some kind of lunatic?"

"Suit yourself, O thing from beyond the stars. Let them lock you up again. Let them stick

electrodes up your ass. I tried to help. That's all I can do, is try," Amanda said, shrugging. She

began to saunter away. She didn't look back. Three steps, four, five, hands in pockets, slowly

heading for her car. Had she been wrong, she wondered? No. No. She could be wrong about some

things, like Charley Taylor's interest in spending the weekend with her, maybe. But not this. That

crinkly-haired chick was the missing alien for sure.

The whole county was buzzing about it: Deadly nonhuman life form has escaped from the detention

center out by Tracy, might be anywhere, Walnut Creek, Livermore, even San Francisco, dangerous

monster, capable of mimicking human forms, will engulf and digest you and disguise itself in your

shape. And there it was, Amanda knew, standing outside the Video Center. Amanda kept walking.

"Wait," the alien said finally.

Amanda took another easy step or two. Then she looked back over her shoulder.

"Yeah?"

"How can you tell?"

Amanda grinned. "Easy. You've got a rain slicker on, and it's only September. Rainy season doesn't

start around here for another month or two. Your pants are the old

Spandex kind. People like you don't wear that stuff anymore. Your face paint is San Jose colors,

but you've got the cheek chevrons put on in the Berkeley pattern. That's just the first three

things I noticed. I could find plenty more. Nothing about you fits together with anything else.

It's like you did a survey to see how you ought to appear and then tried a little of everything.

The closer I study you, the more I see. Look, you're wearing your headphones, and the battery

light is on, but there's no cassette in the slot. What are you listening to, the music of the

spheres? That model doesn't have any FM tuner, you know.

"You see? You may think that you're perfectly camouflaged, but you aren't."

"I could destroy you," the alien said.

"What? Oh, sure. Sure you could. Engulf me right here on the street, all over in thirty seconds,

little trail of slime by the door, and a new Amanda walks away. But what then? What good's that

going to do you? You still won't know which end is up. So there's no logic in destroying me,

unless you're a total dummy. I'm on your side. I'm not going to turn you in."

"Why should I trust you?"

"Because I've been talking to you for five minutes and I haven't yelled for the cops yet. Don't

you know that half of California is out searching for you? Hey, can you read? Come over here a

minute. Here." Amanda tugged the alien toward the newspaper vending box at the curb. The headline

on the afternoon Examiner was

BAY AREA ALIEN TERROR MARINES TO JOIN NINE-COUNTY HUNT

MAYOR, GOVERNOR CAUTION AGAINST PANIC

"You understand that?" Amanda asked. "That's you they're talking about. They're out there with

flame guns,

tranquilizer darts, web snares, and God knows what else. There's been real hysteria for a day and

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Robe...ilverberg%20-%20Amanda%20and%20the%20Alien.txt (1 of 8) [10/16/2004 4:54:12 PM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Robert Silverberg - Amanda and the Alien.pdf

共8页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Robert Silverberg - Amanda and the Alien

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: