"Philip Jose Farmer - Lord Of The Trees and The Mad Goblin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

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LORD OF
THE TREES

The Nine must have marked me off as dead beyond doubt.
I don't know whether or not the pilot of the fighter jet saw me fall into the ocean. If he did, he
probably did not fly down for a closer look. He would have assumed that, if the explosion of my
amphibian did not kill me, the fall surely would. After hurtling twelve hundred feet, I should have
been smashed flat against the surface of the Atlantic off the coast of the West African nation of
Gabon. The waters would be as hard as Sheffield steel when my body struck.
If the pilot had known that men had survived falls from airplanes at even greater heights, he
might have swooped low over the surface just to make certain that I was not alive. In 1942, a
Russian fell twenty-two thousand feet without a parachute into a snow-covered ravine and lived.
And other men have fallen two thousand feet or higher into water or snow and lived. These were
freak occurrences, of course.
The pilot would have reported that the twin engine propellered amphibian I was flying to the
Parc National du Petit Loango had gone up in a ball of flame at the first pass. The .50 caliber
machine guns or rockets or whatever he had used had hit the fuel tanks and burning bits of
wreckage had scattered everywhere. Among the bits, was my body.
I recovered consciousness a few seconds later. Blue was screaming around me. My half-naked
body was as cold as if the wind were rippin through my intestines. The explosion had ripped off
most of my clothing or else they had been torn off when I went through the nose of the craft. I
was falling toward the bright sea, though, at first I sometimes thought I was falling toward the
sky. I whirled over and over, seeing the rapidly dwindling silvery jet speeding inland and the
widely dispersed and flaming pieces describing smoky arcs.
I also saw the white rim of surf and flashing white beaches and, beyond, the green of the bush
jungle.
There was no time or desire to think ironic thoughts then, of course. But if there had been, I
would have thought how ironic it was that I was going to die only a few miles from my
birthplace. If I had thought I was going to die, that is. I was still living, and until the final moment
itself that is what I will always tell myself.
I live.
I must have fallen about two hundred feet when I succeeded in spreading out my legs and arms.
I have done much sky diving for fun and for survival value. It was this that enabled me to flatten
out and gain a stable attitude. I was slowing down my rate of descent somewhat by presenting as
wide an area as possible to the air, acting as my own parachute. And then I slipped into the
vertical position during the last fifty feet, and I entered the water like a knife with my hands
forming the knife's tip.
I struck exactly right. Even so, the impact knocked me out. I awoke coughing saltwater out of
my nose and mouth. But I was on the surface, and if I had any broken bones or torn muscles, I did
not feel them.
There was no sign of the killer plane or of my craft. The sky had swallowed one and the sea the
other.