"Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as
blood;

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely
figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

And the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain
and island were moved out of their placesтАж

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it
were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains
of waters.

тАФThe Revelation of Saint John the Divine




Actual interstellar voyaging was first effected by detaching a planet from its natural
orbit by a series of well-timed and well-placed rocket impulsions, and thus projecting it
into outer space at a speed far greater than the normal planetary and stellar speedsтАж

Then followed wars such as had never before occurred in our galaxy. Fleets of
worlds, natural and artificial, maneuvered among the stars to outwit one another, and
destroyed one another with long-range jets of sub-atomic energy. As the tides of battle
swept hither and thither through space, whole planetary systems were annihilated.

тАФOlaf Stapledon in The Star Maker




Chapter One


Some stories of terror and the supernormal start with a moonlit face at a diamond-paned
window, or an old document in spidery handwriting, or the baying of a hound across
lonely moors. But this one began with an eclipse of the moon and with four glisteningly
new astronomical photographs, each showing starfields and a planetary object.
OnlyтАжsomething had happened to the stars.

The oldest of the photographs was only seven days out of the developer at the time
of the eclipse. They came from three widely separated observatories and one came from
a telescope on a satellite. They were the star-graven runes of purest science, at the
opposite extreme from matters of superstition, yet each photograph struck a twinge of
uneasiness in the young scientist first to see it.

As he looked at the black dots that should have been thereтАжand at the faint black
curlicues that shouldn'tтАжhe felt the barest touch of a strangeness that for a moment
made him kin to the caveman and the devil-worshipper and the witch-haunted Middle