"Philip Jose Farmer - The Empire of the Nine omnibus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

1988
Copyright ┬й 1988 by Philip Jos├й Farmer
All rights reserved

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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LORD OF THE TREES
 AUTHOR'S NOTE

Although the editors of this book insist upon publishing this work as a novel
under my by-line, it is actually Volume X of the Memoirs of Lord Grandrith, as
edited by me for publication. The spellings and anglicisations of Lord Grandrith
have been changed by me for an easier understanding by British readers.

The location of the caves of the Nine and several other places have purposely
been made inexact. This is for the benefit of any reader who might try to find
these places.
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 thou-sand feet without a
parachute into a snow-covered ravine and lived. And other men have fallen two
thou-sand 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 Pare National du Petit Loango had gone up in a ball of flame at the
first pass. The .50 calibre 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 ripping 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 failing 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