"Ellison-SunkenCathedral" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

HARLAN ELLISON

MIDNIGHT IN THE SUNKEN CATHEDRAL

*
Harlan Ellison is the second columnist who has provided us with a story this
issue. Harlan, our film editor, has been composing a lot of short fiction
lately, much of it for his comic book series. The series, produced by Dark Horse
Comics, is called Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor. The issues are spectacular,
the art stunning, and the stories . . . well see for yourself.

*
"Midnight at the Sunken Cathedral" inspired our cover, done by artist Barclay
Shaw.

He walked the bottom of the world and tried not to think about how his father
had died. Half a mile from the ivory sand beach, off the east coast of Andros
Island, two hundred feet below the surface of the Grand Bahama Banks. Trudging
through the warm, cool, warm translucency of the North Atlantic at latitude
24'26" N, longitude 77'57"W. A quarter of a mile from the island -- about
twenty-five miles southwest of Nassau --well within the 1,500,000 square miles
known as the Bermuda Triangle --the ledge suddenly tips out and goes from 80
feet, drops out of all earthly sight, all human conception, to 2000 feet, maybe
3000, maybe more. Miles, incomprehensible miles down, where the pressure of
pounds per square inch is tens, perhaps hundreds of tons. Nothing we know can
survive at such depths. It is called the Wall of Andros, and those depths are
known as the Tongue of the Ocean. In specially constructed bathyspheres, and
once in the International Hard Suit unit called a Newtsuit, the abyssal deep had
been penetrated to the depth most commonly found in the international maritime
atlas, 1382 meters; 4533 feet; almost a mile straight down. They had seen only
darkness below them; and the cataclysmic stress-creaking of tungsten steel and
case-molded maxi-plastic had warned them to pry no deeper, to go back up, go
back home where soft flesh things would not be reduced to a crimson smear.

Walking through gorgeous plant life and coral outcrops and the racing, darting
animated movie of piscatorial chromatics, he pulled himself along in the ancient
hardhat diving suit, grabbing a medusa handful of writhing tubers, clawing the
long-handled sand-fork against a chunk of upthrust coral, stirring the silt
bottom as little as possible, plodding ahead step by step toward the anomaly he
had read on his sonar screen.

In the basement of the Bermuda Triangle, blue as the eye of the most perfect
sapphire ever uncovered, 350 carats, the Star of Asia, he teetered ahead of his
bubble-trail, angled forward at forty-five degrees, hauling his airhose and
lifeline behind him like the great tail of a saurian.

And he tried not to think about the way his father had died.