"Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld 4 - The Magic Labyrinth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

the impression that the two were connected because they moved at the same
speed. Then a woman who knew of such things said that it looked like a
balloon. Malory had never seen one, but he had heard descriptions of them from
nineteenth- and twentieth-centurians, and this did indeed look like the
description.

The other object, far greater, resembled a gigantic cigar.

The same woman said that this was an airship or dirigible

The Magic Labyrinth I 9

or perhaps was a vessel of the unknowns who'd made this planet.

"Angels?" Malory muttered. "Why would they have to use an airship? They have
wings."

He forgot about that and cried out with the others as the huge vessel of the
air suddenly dived. And then he screamed with the others when the vessel
exploded. Burning, it fell toward The River.

The balloon continued to travel northeastward, and after a while it was gone.
Long before that, the flaming airship struck the water. Its skeletal framework
sank almost at once, but some pieces of its skin burned for a few minutes
before they, too, were extinguished.

NEITHER ANGELS NOR DEMONS HAD VOYAGED IN THAT VESSEL of the sky. The man whom
Malory and his wife pulled out of the water and rowed to shore in their boat
was no more and no less human than they. He was a tall dark rapier-thin man
with a big nose and a weak chin. His large black eyes stared at them in the
torchlight, and he said nothing for a long while. After he had been carried
into the community hall, dried off and covered with thick cloths, and had
drunk some hot coffee, he said something in French and then spoke in
Esperanto.

"How many survived?"

Malory said, "We don't know yet."

A few minutes later, the first of twenty-two corpses, some

I

10 I Philip Jose Farmer

very charred, were brought to the bank. One of them was a woman's. Though the
search continued through the night and part of the morning these were all that
were found. The Frenchman was the single survivor. Though he was weak and
still in shock, he insisted on getting up and taking part in the search. When
he saw the bodies by a grailstone, he burst into tears and sobbed for a long