（外文电子版资料）Allen Steele - See Rock City.pdfVIP

See Rock City by Allen Steele Junior pulls into the gravel parking lot outside Doc’s place and switches off the headlights. He lets the engine run for a few moments, listening to a Nashville country music station as he savors a last toke from the joint he’s been smoking since he crossed the De Kalb County line, then he switches off the ignition, stubs out the joint in the ashtray, opens the Camaro’s mismatched door, and climbs out. The night is hot, the air swollen with the kind of midsummer Tennessee humidity that brings out the cicadas and lightning bugs and causes men to drink long past midnight because they can’t sleep. Junior pauses to tuck his sweaty white t-shirt down the front of his jeans and shake his legs a little to make the pants cuffs slide back down over the top of his cowboy boots. A silent flash of heat lightning on the horizon draws his eyes past the parking lot, out to the abandoned cornfield behind the farmhouse where the spaceship squats upon its hydraulic landing gear, listing slightly to one side. it’s a moonless night and Doc has turned off the floodlights surrounding the vessel, but Junior can see its vague shape against the treeline, like a giant Dairy Queen ice cream cone turned upside-down in the middle of a farm field. He spits a big hock on the ground, then the soles of his boots crunch softly against the gravel as he saunters to the door. The front porch lights are off, the shades have been drawn, the little Pepsi Cola sign in the window has been turned around so that it now reads “Sorry, We’re CLOSED,” but Junior didn’t drop out of the eighth grade fifteen years ago before he learned not to believe everything he reads. The door is unlocked; a tin cowbell jangles as he shoves it open and walks in. Two men are seated at a lunch counter on the far end of the room, silhouetted by the dim glow cast by the fluorescent me