"Lumley,.Brian.-.Titus.Crow.2.-.Transition.Of.Titus.Crow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

too far wrong, Henri. That cloak of mine is fitted with an
antigravity device. Makes all your lying carpets look clumsy!'
'An anti - ?'
'And the old clock? Do I remember falling out of it into your study?'
I nodded. 'You do, after raising a storm I thought was going to do for me, yes.'
'Then let's go in there where I can have a look at Old Faithful. He's looking a bit battered, I imagine, the old clock, but there's more work for him yet. One more trip at least. That is, if I gauge my man right.'
'Your man?'
'You, de Marigny, you yourself!' he answered.
That started it off! Here he was, the living answer to every question I had asked myself since waking with a broken body in my hospital bed, and though we had talked and laughed and reminisced together all through the night, I had not once thought to put these all-important questions to him. Now, however, the dam was broken and I began to gabble uncontrollably. Words tumbled out of my mouth, questions piling themselves one on top of another until, comfortably seated in my study, with dawn already spreading pale fingers over the horizon beyond the bay window, Crow held up his hands to quiet me.
'I'll tell you all, Henri,' he said, 'all, but all in good time. I'm tired now and I can tell that you are, too. The journey was long and fatiguing. I've rested and the food and drink have done me good; this reunion of ours here on Earth, safe and sound and hardly the worse for our various adventures, is marvelous. But once I make a start I don't want my story to lag through weariness. It's a tale that will take a long time in the telling anyway. Right now, however' - he got up and moved over to the

enigmatic clock in the corner, reaching to wipe a smudge of some sooty deposit from the great dial - 'now I just want to check over the Old Fellow here, then take a shower, and then it's me for bed for the rest of the day. I'll sleep like a baby, and this time for the sheer luxury of it, not just because I'm exhausted. If you get some rest, too, we'll be able to take all this up again this evening.'
Disappointed though I was I saw his logic. 'All right.' I nodded. 'Just answer me one thing. What did you mean when you said that the clock would be making at least one more trip, a trip involving myself?'
He seemed surprised, then cocked his head on one side to look at me in a curious attitude that I well remembered of old. 'Why, can this be that same lover of mysteries I once knew?'
Puzzled, I opened my mouth to ask his meaning but he cut me off before I could get started. 'De Marigny, I've been to the veriest corners of space and time, I've known a diversity of alien worlds and dimensions. I've lived in the pavilions of Ghengis Khan, journeyed to distant Yuggoth on the Rim, talked with incredible intelligences spawned in the hearts of suns. I've hunted on the mammoth plains of Northumberland, fourteen thousand years ago, with King Conan's own forebears, wandering the very forests and wilds where, twelve thousand years later, Hadrian would build his wall - and I was there, too, during that wall's construction!'
He paused to study the erratic sweep of the four hands about the dial of his clock. '. . . I've been trapped on the shores of a prehistoric ocean, living on my wits and by hunting great crabs and spearing strange fishes, dodging the flying dinosaurs which in turn hunted me. And a billion years before that I inhabited a great rugose cone of a body, a living organism that was in fact a member of the Great Race that settled on Earth in unthinkable

abysses of the past. I've seen the cruel and world-spanning empire of Tsan-Chan three thousand years in the future, and beyond that the great dark vaults that loom at the end of time. I've talked telepathically with the super-intelligent mollusks of Venus' shallow soupy oceans, which will not support even the most primitive life for another half-billion years; and I've swum in those same seas ten million years later when they were sterile, after a great plague had destroyed all life on the entire planet. Why, I've come close to seeing the very birth of the universe, and almost its death! And all of these wonders and others exist still, just beyond the thin mists of time and space.
'This clock of mine sails those mists more bravely and surely than any Viking's dragonship ever crossed the gray North Sea. And you ask me what I mean when I talk of another trip, one involving yourself?
'When I return to Elysia, Henri, to the home of the Elder Gods themselves in a dimension bordering upon Orion, there will be a place for you in my sky-floating castle there. Indeed, you shall have a castle of your own, and dragons to bear you to the great festivals! And why not? The gods mated with the daughters of men in the old days, didn't they? And won't you only be reversing the process? I did, my friend, and now the universe is mine. It can be yours, too!'

PART THREE 1
At the End of Time
(From de Marigny's recordings)
It would verge upon the impossible to attempt a description of the actual sensation of time travel, de Marigny. Frankly, while traveling through time - and I have done that aplenty since last I saw you - there is very little time to think about it! The mind, you see, has to tune in, to become one with the machinery of the space-time machine, to cleave psychically to the very being of the clock. As you know, I was once telepathic to a degree; well, this talent has recently returned to me tenfold. It has been strengthening in me ever since leaving Blowne House on that night of the winds so long ago.
I was and still remain highly psychic; I pick up vibrations which are beyond the sensory perceptions of most other men. Most people are psychically blind, and how may one explain colors to a child blind from birth? Similarly I am unable to explain this sixth psychic sense of mine, or how I managed to control the clock by meshing with its psyche. If I make it sound as if the thing is not a machine but a being in its own right, well, it very nearly is ...
However, most of that is well away from the point, which is that I am unable to explain the sensation of time travel. Even the precise control of the clock still eludes me. Mind you, I am particularly clever at piloting the thing through space - on that I pride myself - but it is a far different matter to pilot a vehicle through time, which is completely against man's nature.
And of course it was for this reason that our first

attempt at traveling together in time was so nearly disastrous. I had very little idea really how to begin to use the clock. I am astonished now that I dared even try it, and you knew even less of the thing's mechanics. You knew only what I had tried to tell you about it. To think that we dared to brave such an adventure, and that we both lived to talk about it!
But anyway, it took me all my time - again that word, though frankly it conveys very little to me now - merely to hang on mentally to the element of the omniverse which the clock became; to try to grip the 'controls' of the thing with my inadequately trained mind while it slipped and slithered on a careening course to and fro across the fabric of the entire space-time spectrum. And whereas the clock itself was built for this kind of work - it is quite simply a vehicle for transdimensional travel - man never was intended to endure such stresses. I had to fight against all the forces of order, forces which were bent upon keeping me in my correct and designated place and time, determined not to let me break away from my own sphere of existence. And moreover, I had to try to keep you with me, de Marigny.
Finally, when I was beginning to believe that I could hang on no longer, when I had almost given up trying to bring the clock under my control and was about to let go and the devil take everything, then I sensed that my vehicle had abruptly steadied itself, that it was hurtling now on a straighter, truer course. I knew then that I had been attempting to exert too great a measure of control, like the novice driver whose lack of dexterity causes his shiny new car to leap and bound. This craft had been designed for a gentler touch than mine, but at last I seemed to be gaining, albeit fractionally, in my understanding of its many and complex subtleties.
And that was when I realized that you, de Marigny,

were slipping away from me. In turning my attention to this mental symbiosis of man and machine I had relaxed my grip on you. I cried out to you to stay with me, to follow me, to mesh your mind with mine and become one with me and the machine, but it was too late, for you were already gone!
I had no idea how to check my machine. It was a demon steed bounding through the years, and having no reins 1 could but cling grimly to its streaming mane. You were gone, lost in the seas of time, and I could not even begin to know where or how to search for you. And almost as if you had been a human anchor chaining the time ship to your own age, now that the chain was broken it leaped along the timestream ever faster, its vibrations attuned to the rushing, dizzying currents at time's very rim!
Now I turned all my psychic perception to a greater penetration of the clock's being and, despite my horror at your loss in unknown voids, I found a mad euphoria in the sensation of sheer speed as the centuries sped by with the ticking of a clock or the beating of my straining heart. Now my more mundane senses came into play, though in a thoroughly extramundane fashion, for projected through the sensory equipment of my vessel, which I later came to think of as scanners, I saw the known constellations flying through space in a terrifying spiral, speeding up even as I watched until their tracks were blinding whirls and the passage of alien galaxies showed as stupefying tracks across the sky.
1 knew then that at this rate of acceleration eternity itself must soon rush to a close, and no sooner had this terrific thought dawned on me than for the first time I heard Tiania's voice. You have heard her voice, Henri, when Ithaqua attacked us in the void. Just as she warned us against the Wind-Walker, which I thought a mere

mental projection of the CCD, so she warned me as I rushed ever faster into the future.
'No, my love,' she said. 'You are too rash! Stop! Stop now! Only the End lies that way!'
A guardian angel? The mind of the clock in which I ate the aeons speaking to me telepathically? A voice of madness, my own, ringing in my head as my mind crumpled under stresses and visions never before experienced, never meant for experiencing by a mind of man? All of these things I considered, all flashing instantly through my thoughts - all rejected. You have heard that
voice, Henri . . .
I heard it. I knew it was Love and Beauty and Truth, and in that same instant I commenced a frantic mental search for my vessel's brakes.
Now, Henri, sit yourself in an automobile, get it in gear, top gear, then push the accelerator down to the floor and watch while the needle creeps up and up until it moves off the scale and the road becomes a blur beneath your wheels. Then take your hands from the steering wheel and throw all your weight against the brakes. This, in effect, is what I did!
Of course, given the circumstances I have just described, you would very likely die. Almost certainly you would be a hospital case and your car would be wrecked, but whatever the end results they would all be physical. My journey, however, was along no merely mundane road, neither was I subject to inertia or gravitational stresses as we know them, nor could I be said to actually feel the result of the abrupt temporal deceleration in any physical way, but mentally . . .!
There was no windshield for my body to hurtle through, no hard concrete surface to receive me. Welded to my machine, I simply decelerated along with it, but at the instant that deceleration began all my perceptions shot

dizzily forward in time, to the limit of time itself, affording me glimpses of the dead black tombs which wait for all matter and energy at the very end!