（外文电子版资料）Tom Easton - Alien Resonance.pdfVIP

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/Alien%20Resonance.txt ALIEN RESONANCE Tom Easton Box 2724, RFD 4 Belfast, ME 04915 207-338-1074 a novella of about 25,300 words I Alec Strange balanced on a lichen-covered boulder. Other boulders lay to right and left, rounded humps and tilted slabs set in a matrix of sand and gravel and broken sticks. The heavy boughs of balsam firs swayed at his back, saplings of birch and maple thrusting up among them. Sunlight striking through new growth bathed him in cool, soft green. He faced a deep pool set about with granite and shale, its waters darkened by the juices of rotting leaves. Glints of sun soaked into the brook, glowing brown. Dabs of foam drifted on the current. Shadows marked the bottom, and a hollow fell away beneath a steep-sided rock. When Alec cast his fly over the pools deepest spot, a gray-green shape sped from the dark below. His heart began to race. He grinned, his hand tensed on the rod, and a moment later he held an eight-inch trout in his hand. Then he moved on, stepping from his boulder to another, savoring the crunch of lichen, the cushion of moss, the brush of fir across his cheek. He moved up the stream, following a redstart as it soared bright from shade to sun. He stepped over a cleft in the rock, and he paused. Beneath him gleamed something odd. He shifted his feet, laid down his rod, and bent to thrust his arm shoulder-deep into a miniature, gravel-bottomed canyon. He touched strangeness, a golden ovoid as out of place in these woods as a Cadillac. He scraped it with his nails, rapped it with his knuckles, measured it with his eyes. Its metallic luster deceived, for though it rang lightly at his touch, it seemed less like gold than like some high-quality ceramic, a giant egg perhaps two feet long. He wondered at the sort of people who would leave such a thing in wilderness. He wondered if it might not have fallen from a plane, perhaps a military craft on man