"Philip Jose Farmer - The Wind Whales Of Ishmael" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

The Wind Whales of Ishmael
by Philip Jos├й Farmer
eVersion 4.0 / Scan Notes at EOF


Back Cover:

The earth never stopped shaking and the seas were dried up; the sun was a giant dying and the
moon was falling; and most of life had taken to the air which was itself disappearing. But human nature
had not changed as swiftly as the world in which it existed. . . and where there were whales, a whaler
from another age would always find a home.
With no more noise than of a ghost gliding over the ocean, the sea disappeared.
Night was replaced by day.
The ship Rachel was falling.
And Ishmael, the lone survivor of Ahab's Pequod and now of the Rachel, fell through the empty
sea-space and landed in another world.
Where he landed was a place on Earth, but not of his time. Here, without seas, was a place of
mighty whalers: of harpooners who flew their boats more than sailed them; and whales who soared for
the heights where the air was too thin for men, instead of diving for the deeps. Here, too, was the home
of the Purple Beast of the stinging death, but here also was the key to mankind's future.


Ace Books
A Division of Charter Communications Inc.
1120 Avenue of the Americas
New York, N.Y. 10036

The Wind Whales of Ishmael
Copyright ┬й, 1971, by Philip Jos├й Farmer

All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Kelly Freas.
Printed in U.S.A.




One man survived.
The great white whale with its strange passenger, and the strangled monomaniac its trailer, had
dived deeply. The whaling ship was on its last, its vertical, voyage. Even the hand with the hammer and
the hawk with its wing nailed to the mast were gone to the deeps, and the ocean had smoothed out the
tracks of man with all the dexterity of billions of years of prac-tice. The one man thrown from the boat
swam about, knowing that he would soon go down to join his fel-lows.
And then the black bubble, the last gasp of the sinking ship, burst. Out of the bubble the
coffin-canoe of Queequeg soared, like a porpoise diving into the sky, and fell back, rolled, steadied, and
then bobbed gently. The porpoise had become a black bottle containing a mes-sage of hope.
Buoyed up by that coffin, he floated for a day and a night on a soft and dirge-like sea. On the
second day, the devious-cruising Rachel, in her retracing search af-ter her missing children, found
another orphan.
Captain Gardiner thought Ishmael's story the stran-gest he had ever heard, and he had heard