"Alan Dean Foster - With friends like these." - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

placed in the pubUc sanitarium for the poor at Rancagua, but apparently escaped last year from
that well-known institution.
The other "items of interest" which the good Senor Malpelo forwarded to me was much shorter, but
of no less import. It was a bit from a small Valparaiso newspaper stating that one Juan Maria y
Gomez, given occupation, shipwright, was missing and presumed lost at sea during the night of a
storm on June 6, 1967. A trawling fishing boat came upon the shattered wreckage of Senor Gomez's
boat the next day. It is mentioned that the ship must have passed through an exceptionally violent
part of the storm, because what pieces of the ship's fittings were found were battered beyond all
recognition, even to the shaft of one of the ship's screws, which was twisted quite completely out
of shape.
Lately, I have been showing the cryptic symbols which appeared in Professor Turner's hand above
the word Cthulhu around the University. The reaction I get is peculiar in the extreme. Most
professors who see it'take it in good humor as an unusual student prank. Those few who do not find
it funny exhibit an odd trembling of the hands when they first set eyes upon it, but cover up very
quickly thereafter and pronounce the symbol an insulting hoax. They are quite forceful about this,
and wish to have no more to do with it. I am much puzzled, as this seems to occur almost always
with the older professors,
The first of the charts I copied shows the general area of the South Pacific. It has drawn in
Easter Island, a rough duplication of Cook's courses for his voyages of 1773-75, and a number of
other notations and markings, most of which are unintelligible. Most peculiar of these is an "X"
at approximately 167 degrees east longitude, and 77 degrees south latitude. Under these
coordinates are the notes "Halley's, '86," which doubtless refers to the next reappearance of the
famous Halley comet, due back in our solar vicinity in 1986. A check of a National Geographic map
of this area reveals that the above coordinates intersect on or very near Mt. Erebus, the 15,000-
foot-high active volcano on McMurdo Sound in Anartica. What this has to do with the next
appearance of Halley's comet is no doubt known only to Professors Turner and Nolan.
The second sketch is simply a crude map of the world with two lines drawn in on it. Although
laughable in its simplicity, I was rather intrigued by this, as the two lines ran thusly: one went
in a straight line from that "X" (Mt. Erebus?) to Easter Island. The other line runs from Easter,
through the center "of its neighbor, Sala-y-Gomez, to a spot in the Andes of Northern Chile. This,
again coincidentally, happens to be the area Professor Fernandez was exploring when he was killed
by the earthquake. Straight as an arrow, it continues onward with three other "X's" marked along
its length. One is somewhere in the jungle of the Matto Grosso (memo: write the Brazilian Land
Survey), another in the Brazilian Basin, the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, to end finally
near Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia. i
The last item was neither note nor chart, but rather a sketch-drawing of what seemed to be some
enormous pyramidUke structure of ridiculous shape, with accompanying notes in Turner's hand. This
was the sole item I managed to smuggle from the library intact. I regret that soon afterward I was
offered a really ridiculous sum of money for it, no questions asked, from a wealthy professor I
was consulting, and so sold it to him. He has since moved.
That completes what I have found to be an exceedingly odd collection of facts, and until
Professors Turner and Nolan return (from wherever they are) I am afraid much of this material must
remain as puzzling as ever. I hope you find it of some little interest. Besides, I have come to
think it wise to have the facts in the hands of an unadvertised party. Lately I have had the
feeling of being followed, especially at night. I was also forced to move from my former apartment
after experiencing a spell of severe nightmares unique in their prismatic horror. The doctor at
the University assured me that these are the natural results of overwork at school. This may be,
but the series of twelve grooves, six to a side, that I found etched into the glass of my one
window one morning after a particularly vivid phantasm of terror have made me cautious. One thing
I know, and that is that they were not the result of overwork at school.