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

I perceived it, I recognized it and in the next moment, like an elastic band stretched almost to breaking point and then released, my psyche snapped back into place within its fleshy house; and in that same instant I let go all control and surrendered myself to what I knew must be death.
But of course I was wrong. It was not death; I was merely stunned. The mind of the clock, with which my own mind had been in some sort of symbiotic rapport, had taken the brunt of the shock. No, I was simply unconscious, suffering from . . . from a badly bruised psyche, if you like.
When I came to I was very cold. I was dressed quite
lightly, just as I left Blowne House, in slacks, a silk shirt
and a smoking jacket, and the cold seemed to be pene
trating through to my very bones. My face lay in dust.
Turning, I saw that I lay half in, half out of the clock, in a
dust bowl of a valley between low hills whose crests were
gray against a dark blue sky.
At first I thought it was late evening and that a great, swollen moon hung in the sky at the zenith, but an orange moon?
And something was nuzzling at my neck!
I cried out and rolled away from whatever it was, leaping to my feet and immediately staggering and falling as my senses whirled in an attack of nausea. The clock remained open, enigmatic as ever, its aberrant ticking strangely faint. Something crawled slowly in the purple pulsing light from its open panel.
The thing was some eight or nine inches long, deeply furred like a great caterpillar, featureless as far as I could

see. The scene swam momentarily before my eyes. I carefully felt my reeling head and drank, air deep into my lungs, or at least I tried to! Now what on Earth was wrong with my lungs? Nothing, it was simply that the air was very thin. Then I must be high in some mountainous region, which alone might explain the cold and the rarity of air. I was far in the future, that much I knew, but how
far?
The crawling thing, moving very slowly, was now levering its furry body up and into the pulsing interior of the clock. Whatever it was, this creature, it seemed to have done me no harm. I certainly wished it none. Unless one is prepared, the clock can play hideous tricks. It is not only capable of traveling in space and time, it can also transmit matter into space and time while remaining stationary itself! I somehow knew, I was aware, that I had nothing to fear from the furry creature; it was harmless as a kitten without claws. So before it could cross the threshold into the clock's transdimensional interior, I stepped forward and caught it up. Instantly it snuggled into my jacket like a cold kitten would, and I knew that my body's heat had been the attraction which had first drawn the creature to me. Instinctively I called it Puss, stroking its deep fur as I peered about at the twilight hills. 'Puss,' I told the creature, 'I would get a better view of things from the top of those hills. What do you say we climb them and see what's become of the world, eh?'
The soil of the hillside was very crumbly, flaky with a sort of gray-brown rust, but here and there small horizontal burrows offered footholds as I climbed the fairly steep incline. I saw two more of the furry creatures as I rose up out of the valley, and then another emerging from its burrow. Toward the crest of the hill an even larger group of them gathered about a greeny-gray shrub whose brittle, withered twigs and drooping leaves they appeared to be

eating. I did not break my climb to discover how this was accomplished but placed my odd little friend among its cousins at the shrub and carried on until, heaving and gasping for air, I stood wearily upon the crest of the hill.
And that was when I felt the first pangs of an incredible fear, a dread that set my teeth to chattering even more than the numbing cold, and the hair to bristling at the nape of my neck. No, it was much more than merely fear. I actually stood in awe of immensities whose like I had only ever guessed at, which now lay behind me in the wake of my fantastic journey. For this was indeed the twilight of Earth. I stood at the deathbed of a planet, and if proof were needed then that proof now hung like a ghastly, leprous sickle low in the sky over distant mountains. It was the moon, and the pregnant orange orb directly overhead could only be the sun, once golden and fiery but dulled now and dying in its turn!
A faint, eerie wind stirred the dust of ages at my feet as I gasped painfully at the thin air, turning slowly in order to take in everything of this time-ravaged scene. My vantage point stood up a little from its immediate surroundings, as if I stood upon the rim of a crater, and I guessed that this could well be the nature of that declivity in which my machine now stood. Meteoric impacts must surely be far more frequent now that time had so attenuated Earth's atmospheric envelope. I looked back at the clock, behind and some distance below my position, and felt reassured at the sight of the weird purple glow in whose pool it silently stood, like some alien spacecraft in the valleys of the moon.
Then I turned my face once more to the incredible scene that lay outside the crater wall, that picture of a planet at death's door. As I have said, distant mountains supported a thin-horned leper-moon, but even the mountains seemed flattened somehow and lower than they

ought to be, as if weighed down by sons of gravity and worn away by the countless sands of time, until now they brooded like huge unmajestic humps on the far horizon.
Between myself and the mountains, beneath this hideous midday sun, a vast flat plain extended, gray-mottled and reddish in places as if rusted. Was not Mars once equally red in the eye of a childhood telescope? And had I not wondered if those great red sores had once been towns, and the straight and inexplicable lines between them highways?
Earth - this? The third planet from the sun, green and juicy and lush with life, howling in its season with nature's fury and lapped by giant oceans - this? This dry dust bowl of rust and weary lichens, of dumb, furry caterpillars, feeble winds and chill, lifeless air - Earth? Impossible! And yet I knew that it was so. And again I wondered how far, how many billions of years I had journeyed into tomorrow.
I shivered and blew into my cold, cupped hands. It was my intuition that I had not strayed far in space during my journey through time. I mean that while knowing my machine had advanced me fearfully far into the future, I believed that it had continued to occupy its original geographic location in space. If I was correct, then it seemed plain the machine must be fitted with some mechanism to make automatic compensation for planetary motion and alterations in surface levels, for surely in the absence of such compensation the clock might materialize anywhere at the end of a time-jump. High in the air, underground, even beneath mighty oceans as the continents rose and fell like the interminable waves of some leaden sea throughout the ages.
So I stood now not far from the spot where the walls of Blowne House had once sheltered me from the elements, even against those malign elementals of the air which tore

our refuge down about us as we fled, you and I, de Marigny, into time. And here it was, noon, with the old sun directly overhead, and chilly as a London November! It was an awesome sensation, to stand there atop that crater's ridge, in a twilight land at the end of time . . .
As the cold worked itself deeper into my bones I started to beat my arms across my body, watching my warm breath crystallize as it plumed off into the thin air. I decided then to walk around the rim of the crater to its far side. Perhaps there would be a better view from there. At first I walked slowly, taking care not to fall and tumble down the steep crater wall, but shortly I began to hurry, as much as the thin air and my labored breathing would allow, as it dawned on me that hope sprang yet within me. What if ... what if ... supposing man lived yet within this withered husk of a world? Perhaps, deep down beneath the starveling crust, closer to the warm core, the spires and columns of great cities reared even now, their subterranean sidewalks teeming with life and, and . . .
My hopes for mankind sank abruptly low as I finally reached a point on the crater wall from which I could gaze south at what was once London, the greatest of capitals, now a great gray desolation! Then, to the west, twin fires blazed briefly in the dark blue sky, distracting me as they raced to earth. Meteorites at noon! My eyes followed their balefire to the horizon, then I turned my gaze southward again. What of the green downs of Surrey, Kent and Sussex? Away beyond the sprawling flat scab where once London had proudly stood, as far as my appalled eyes could see, stretched only that same endless gray wasteland.
1 shuddered again as a feeble wisp of wind blew the dust of forgotten millennia over my shoes, and I felt an ache in my heart that I knew had little or nothing to do with the bitter chill of the air. It dawned on me then that

I could never leave this place, this future Earth, until I had satisfied myself against all hope that indeed she was barren of human life. With this in mind I began to slip and slide back down the inner wall of the crater to the clock. So far I had not tested the thing as a vehicle in the normal sense of the word, as a machine for traveling in three dimensions as opposed to four. Now would be as good a time as any.
My first trip was a very short one, more of a hop, really. I simply piloted my craft across the bottom of the crater. Of course there was no window I could look out of, and no controls as such. I merely plugged myself in mentally to the mind of the clock and moved it in the direction I wished to move. The clock's scanner system served me far better than any window would have done, for I could see far more clearly than through any Earthly sheet of glass. The whole process of the exercise was ridiculously simple, and the clock completed its first test trip by following a low mid-air trajectory and coming to rest without the slightest bump. Moreover, though I had witnessed the clock's movements in the mental scanner, I had experienced no physical sense of motion during the short journey. Patently my machine traversed space no less efficiently than time!

The Last Race
(From de Marigny's recordings)
My second trip was somewhat more adventurous. I flew the craft up over the lip of the crater to the gray plain beyond. By now I was starting to experience a great pleasure in my increasing ability to control the clock, and so I determined to move on at once in search of ... of what? Hope springs eternal, and I felt there had to be at least a chance that I could find the vestiges of mankind. Just what this need of mine really was, this suddenly insistent urge within me to find in this unthinkably distant future world some recognizable remnant of man, I cannot really say, unless it was simply the loneliness! No man before me, no Robinson Crusoe, not even the first lone astronaut, had ever been more remote from his fellows than I.
I felt remote. It shocked me to think that, by all normal terms of reckoning and depending upon how long I had lain unconscious at the foot of the clock in the crater, I had been in my home on the outskirts of a teeming metropolis only a few short hours ago. And yet it was billions of years since I was last in the world of men and in the company of a friend, you yourself, de Marigny, removed from me now by countless gulfs of space and time.
However; in addition to this insistent and poignant urge of mine to search the Earth for some revenant of man's lost glory, I now felt a desire to test the clock's vehicular speed. Fortunately I was wise before the fact in this latter trial. I took the clock up, way up out of harm's way, until in my mental scanner the now thin atmospheric envelope

was plainly visible against the curve of the Earth. I must have risen to a height of some fifteen to twenty miles, and right across the indigo sky meteorites large and small were burning themselves out in fiery descents. Up there I set course to the left of the leper-moon and tentatively opened up my mental throttle. The Earth smoothly commenced rotating beneath me. As my speed picked up, in a sudden surge of exhilaration, I fed fuel to the motor of my machine - and much more than I intended!
Immediately the scanners blurred; the screen in my mind became indistinct and seemed to tremble with a rushing darkness shot with lines of fire. In that same instant, in something akin to panic and believing some' thing to be terribly wrong, I canceled all of the clock's forward motion.
Again there came the mental shock of instant and complete deceleration, but in no way as devastating as that traumatic temporal shock I had known. Almost immediately my psychic scanner cleared to afford me an unobstructed view of the clock's surroundings.
We hung stationary, my vehicle and I, and my momentary terror was now completely forgotten in the breathless contemplation of what I had wrought with that one petty burst of overexuberance. I knew then that my scanners had been working all along, that things had only seemed to blur because of the fantastic speed I had achieved! All mathematical impossibilities to the contrary, the clock had defied Einstein himself! I had traveled, for something less than one second, at a speed which must have been in excess of that of light!
And this time my machine had followed no parabolic trajectory around the curve of the Earth. Why should it when I had not demanded as much of it? Indeed, my last mental instructions had directed the clock, albeit