"Raymond Z. Gallun - The Eternal Wall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gallun Raymond Z)

THE ETERNAL WALL
by RAYMOND Z. GALLUN

"SEE you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the party telephone. "We'll be out at the Silver
Basket before ten-thirty. . . ."
Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was why he was in a hurry to get to
the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly
around Pit Bend.
There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights
glaring blindingly past a high, upjutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road.
Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swift young reflexes to rely on
to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County
Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend.
Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the
white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge
boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky
waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath. . . .



Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty
splash. He had only a dazing welt on his forehead, and a gag of terror in his throat.
Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he
could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the
ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of whiteтАФfor the
water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid
rushed up through the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew that his friends and his
family would never even see his body again, lost beyond recovery in this abyss.
The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on the dash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute
darkness. A flood rushed in at the shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it was
jammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water. The welt,
left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not
think clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath, bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs.
His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he and his dad had had in
Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irish eyesтАФlike in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to
the State University this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime. . . . Goodbye, Betty. . . .
The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The
eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked
along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait. . .
"KAALLEEE! Tik! . . . Tik, tik, tik! . . . Kaalleee! . . ."
The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from the
depths of a powder-dry gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noonday Sun was red
and huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill.
"Kaalleee! . . . Tik, tik, tik! ..."
At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then other vocal organs
took up that trilling wail, and those short, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering
notes mixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the
babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable.
The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of
dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and