"Edmond Hamilton - Birthplace Of Creation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

Birthplace
of Creation
A Captain Future Novelet by EDMOND HAMILTON
In their final adventure the Futuremen are called on to
save the Universe itself from a madmanтАЩs destructive whim!


gone out to other worlds and other stars.
They had ranged far across space, founding
CHAPTER I
colonies on asteroids and cities on the
shores of alien seas. But they left the
Citadel of the Futuremen
deathly airless Moon alone. They had
looked at it once and gone away. There
were only four who made the Moon their

G ARRAND watched the face of the homeтАФand not all of those four where
Moon grow larger in the forward men.
port of his small cruiser. A white and Tycho Crater widened out below the
terrible face, he thought. A deathтАЩs- head little ship. Licking dry lips metallic with
with meteor-gnawed bones and gaping the taste of fear, Garrand consulted a map,
crater-wounds, bleak and cruel and very drawn carefully to scale and showing in
silent, watching him come and thinking that desolation one intricate diagram of a
secret boding thoughts about him. A man-made structure. There were ominous
feeling of sickness grew in him. gaps in that diagram and Garrand was
тАЬI am a fool and soon I will probably be painfully aware of them. He made his
a dead fool,тАЭ he said to himself. calculations and set his ship down well
He was not a brave man. He was very beyond the outer periphery of defenses
fond of living and he did not think of death marked on the chart.
at all as a thing to be dared and laughed at. His landing was a clumsy nervous one.
The knowledge that he was likely to die White pumice-dust burst upward around
there on the Moon gave him qualms of the hull and settled slowly back again.
physical anguish that made him look as Garrand cut his jets and sat for a moment
white and hollow as the stony face that looking out across Tycho, all ringed
watched him through the port. And yet he around in the distance with cliffs and spires
did not turn back. There was something in and pinnacles of blasted rock that glittered
Garrand that was stronger than his fear. in the light. There was no sign of the
His hands trembled, but they held the structure indicated on the chart. It was all
cruiser grimly on its course. below ground. Even its observatory dome
The stark plains and mountain ranges was set flush, reflecting the SunтАЩs
took size and shape, the lonely mountains unsoftened glare no more than the
of the Moon that looked on nothing and the surrounding plain.
plains where nothing stirred, not even the
smallest wind or whirl of dust. Men had


1
P RESENTLY Garrand rose, moving waste until his footsteps in the dust
with the stiff reluctance of a man approached the line of that outer circle on