"Edmond Hamilton - Captain Future 27 - Birthplace of Creation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

1
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 madman's destructive whim!
CHAPTER I
Citadel of the Futuremen
ARRAND watched the face of the
Moon grow larger in the forward
port of his small cruiser. A white and
terrible face, he thought. A death's-head
with meteor-gnawed bones and gaping
crater-wounds, bleak and cruel and very
silent, watching him come and thinking
secret boding thoughts about him. A
feeling of sickness grew in him.
"I am a fool and soon I will probably be
a dead fool," he said to himself.
He was not a brave man. He was very
fond of living and he did not think of death
at all as a thing to be dared and laughed at.
The knowledge that he was likely to die
there on the Moon gave him qualms of
physical anguish that made him look as
white and hollow as the stony face that
watched him through the port. And yet he
did not turn back. There was something in
Garrand that was stronger than his fear.
His hands trembled, but they held the
cruiser grimly on its course.
The stark plains and mountain ranges
took size and shape, the lonely mountains
of the Moon that looked on nothing and the
plains where nothing stirred, not even the
smallest wind or whirl of dust. Men had
gone out to other worlds and other stars.
They had ranged far across space, founding
colonies on asteroids and cities on the
shores of alien seas. But they left the
deathly airless Moon alone. They had
looked at it once and gone away. There
were only four who made the Moon their
home--and not all of those four where
men.
Tycho Crater widened out below the
little ship. Licking dry lips metallic with
the taste of fear, Garrand consulted a map,
drawn carefully to scale and showing in
that desolation one intricate diagram of a