"Edmond Hamilton - The Sun Smasher" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

THE SUN SMASHER
By
EDMOND HAMILTON
A Renaissance E Books publication
ISBN 1-58873-914-7
All rights reserved
Copyright ┬й 1959, renewed Estate of Edmond Hamilton
Reprinted by permission Spectrum Literary Agency
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.
For information contact:
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PageTurner Editions/Futures-Past Science Fiction


CHAPTER 1
YOU WERE a real person, a normal individual. You lived a real life, in a real world. And then in one
day, in a few hours of one day, it all fell away around you like a structure of thin paper crumbling in the
rain, and you found that you had stepped right out of it into an abyss as wide and dark as the cosmos,
without beginning, without end, without one solid truth to cling to.

That was the way it seemed to Neil Banning. He was thirty-one-years old, he was a New York
publisher's salesman, he was healthy, well-adjusted, and he liked his job. He ate three meals a day,
worried about his income tax, and thought occasionally about getting married. He had a past, and a
future. But that was before he went to Greenville.

It was pure chance. A sales trip to the West Coast, the realization on the train that he was only a hundred
miles from his boyhood home, and a sudden sentimental decision. Three hours later, in bright spring
sunshine, he debarked in the little Nebraska town.

He looked up at the blue prairie sky with the cloud flecks in it, and he looked along the wide, unbusy
main street. He smiled. It hadn't changed too much. Towns like Greenville are timeless.

There was one taxi-cab at the station. The driver, a long-jawed young man with a nondescript cap on the
back of his head, put Banning's bags in the cab and said, тАЬExcelsior Hotel, mister? It's the best one,"

Banning said, тАЬJust take the bags there. I'll walk."

The young man looked at him. тАЬCost you fifty cents anyway. Might as well ride."

Banning paid him. тАЬI'll still walk.'

"It's your money, mister,тАЭ said the young man. He drove off, and Banning started along the street with the
fresh prairie wind whipping his topcoat around his legs.

The feed store, the lumber company, the old Horton hardware, Del Parker's barbershop. The Court
House, set squat and dumpy in its square. The Dairy Lunch had a new sign featuring a colossal
triple-deck ice-cream cone, and the Hiway Garage was bigger now, with a side lot full of farm
implements.

He walked slowly, taking his time. The people he passed looked at him with the open, friendly curiosity