"Edmond Hamilton - The Monsters of Juntonheim" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

slide away to either side, almost at right angles. If this was refraction, it was a type that was completely
unknown to science.


My storm-tossed plane hurtled with reckless speed toward the edge of the vast blind spot; I could see
nothing whatever ahead. Everything seemed crazily twisted out of focus, distorted by that weird wall.


Abruptly the gale flung my reeling plane directly through the fantastic wall that defied my vision and I
was inside the blind spot! But now I could not see outside it.


This this is impossible! I gasped with startled terror.


I could see nothing but the interior, a great space of tossing ocean, curving ominously to every sinister
horizon. Black waves, black clouds ... Suddenly I gasped in amazement. Far ahead loomed a long, high
mass of forbidding, dark land.


The storm still howled with all its original fury, carrying me dangerously low over the foam-fanged waves
toward the distant land. Through the scudding snow, I detected a faint greenish radiance. But realization
of my immediate peril swept away my demoralization. I could not land in that vicious sea. Yet neither
could I climb again in that gale.


The land I had glimpsed was now a mile ahead of me, its frowning eastern cliffs stretching right across
my course. The gray precipices were hundreds of feet high. Above them, the land ran back into dark
forests and shaggy wooded hills where no landing was possible. Then I saw a small beach strewn with
boulders. Pure desperation made me head the plane toward it.


Over the boiling white hell of breakers I shot. My wheels touched the beach. Before I could brake with
the forward jets, the port window smashed against a projecting boulder. But that was the only damage
when I stopped out of reach of the waves.


I shut off the rocket motor and stumbled out of the ship. My knees were trembling with the reaction of
prolonged tenseness. But the land and sea inside the incredible blind spot made me forget my exhaustion.


The air was keenly cold. It was the cold of an ordinary northern spring, though, not the bitter polar chill it
should have been. The sky was dark with clouds, fleeing before the gale. The boom of raging surf and
keen of wailing winds were loud in my ears. Stranger even than the comparative warmth was the faint
green radiance that seemed to pervade the air. An eldritch glow that could barely be seen, it seemed to
stream upward from the ground. It was oddly exhilarating.


Might be gamma radiation from some unknown source, I reasoned. That may account for the
refraction that makes this whole area a blind spot. I wish I had instruments here to check. Hope it