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

obliquely, at a spot ahead of me and to the left of the sickle moon.
And I had reached just such a spot!
To my right, half in black shadow, half in dull yellow and pinkish gray light, the moon's great pitted orb loomed huge, and away behind me Earth's grim gray disk floated like a tarnished coin in midnight vaults.
I knew then that I had a machine in which I might very easily fly out beyond the farthest stars and, despite all the unknown and unimaginable terrors of such a voyage, or perhaps because of them, I admit that I was sorely tempted.
But there was something I had to know first, about which I must be absolutely sure before I could contemplate any other adventures in this amazing craft of mine, and that was the question of man and his continuation or extinction. To my knowledge, there was only one place where the answer might be found; and so, more carefully this time, I set my return course for the gray disk of Earth.
How long I spent orbiting the Earth at a height of some fifteen miles and on a course designed to allow an eventual observation of the complete surface I cannot say. I know that I was completing each revolution in something less than two hours, and that therefore my relative speed must be in the region of fifteen thousand miles per hour, but I kept no count of my revolutions for my concentration was equally divided between control of the clock and observation of the transient terrain below. I know that toward the end of my search, when I believed that at least I had found what I was looking for, I was very tired and hungry and I had lost all sense of direction and orientation.
Below me it was late evening, and the very last rays of the dim sun, sinking over the curve of the Earth, struck

silvery sparks from some mile-high object towering way down by the shore of an sons-dead sea.
I slowed my craft and swooped lower, hovering at a safe distance until the sun had set proper, before determining to bring the clock down for the night at a spot some five or six miles to the west of that gigantic artifact whose merest outlines I had glimpsed from on high. As I settled my craft down to a landing lighter than the touch of the most weightless feather, I searched the land to the east for lights. Surely, if the edifice I had seen was a building of sorts, the place would be illuminated at night? But there again, what if it was simply a deserted, unused entrance way, a vast construction guarding a door to those inner worlds I had envisioned deep within the dead crust and that much closer to the still-warm core of the planet? In any event, other than the transient flaring of frequent meteorites, there were no lights, and so I settled down to sleep in the warm interior of the clock, determining that in the morning I would fly to the strange structure and perhaps satisfy that craving of mine for knowledge of man's ultimate station.
And here I find that I must attempt something of a description of the clock's interior.
The clock is, well, its interior is - how might one describe it? - greater than its external dimensions might suggest. By that I mean that it reverses all the demonstrable laws of geometry. Its internal 'angles', like those with which the ancient Cthulhu spawn were familiar and which were used in the construction of their nightmare sepulch-ers, were non-Euclidean. It was my first thought that to achieve this compact enclosure of a large area within a smaller space, hyperspace principles must be involved. Such concepts make difficult and highly conjectural theories as Mobius-strip mathematics seem as easy as the ABC by comparison. In this, though there was no way I

could have known it at the time, I was actually understating the clock's fantastic properties. While I myself can now visualize and understand its basic principles, still it is literally impossible for me to describe them in anything other than the most commonplace terms or by use of the feeblest analogies.
What I said before, about the clock being a matter-transmitter as well as a space-time ship, has some bearing upon it. And yet perhaps such a statement gives an equally incorrect impression. Let me say instead that the clock is linked with all points in space-time. If the universe consisted of a two-inch cube composed of eight one-inch cubes - the three mundane dimensions, plus time and four others - then the clock would always lie at the exact center of the two-inch cube, where the innermost points or corners of the eight hypothetical dimensions of time and space meet. A mental push will send the clock itself traveling along a line parallel to any four of these dimensions at the same time. Of course my illustration ignores the fact that there are an infinite number of space-time dimensions, just as there are an infinite number of stars in space, but the same principles apply.
So within the clock, where all these interdimensional lines of force are gathered together and concentrated, there an untrained or inexpert adventurer may 'take a step' or 'fall' in any of an infinite number of 'directions', while the shell of the vessel itself remains static at its focal point of existence. Psychically then, the clock is everywhere and every when, but it can only be somewhere physically when directed by a second psyche, that of its user.
I fear I've lost you, de Marigny, but don't let it worry you. I've chewed the thing over countless times and I still occasionally lose myself!
And still I haven't described the clock's interior, have

I? Well, picture the thickest London fog you've ever seen, a solid wall of swirling gray through which you can't see a hand in front of your face. Now then, take away the dampness that invariably accompanies such a fog, and similarly remove all the physical phenomena you usually associate with it. Finally, let the pavement beneath your feet gradually lose substance until it too is gone, but without incurring any sensations of imbalance or falling, and there you have it.
The clock retains a temperature as nearly that of the human body as makes no difference, and provided one can plug in to its psychic receptors, then one can be perfectly comfortable. You could pack an army into that clock, de Marigny, and you could make all of them comfortable! When I'm tired I imagine a couch, and I lie on it. Picture that, me asleep on a couch, in a hyperspatial dimension, at a junction of unimaginable forces, and all within the confines of something that looks just like a grandfather clock, albeit one which has very little to do with any chronological system devised by man!
But to get on with my story.
I was up at dawn, if that gradual lightening of the sky, in which the stars never quite managed to extinguish themselves above the monstrous desert of Earth, could ever be called a dawn. The waning orange sun was rising in the dark blue of the eastern sky. And yet, despite the fact that the sun was dying, still its rising was my undoing, for of course the enigmatic structure I so desired to investigate lay in just that direction, to the east. Pitifully dim though the sun was by the standards of this twentieth century, still it was bright enough to throw the face of that towering edifice into shadow. Because of this I found myself approaching the thing blind, as it were, and I did so to within a distance of some three and a half miles. The base of the skyscraper (so I had come to think of it,

though its actual purpose was as much a mystery as ever) lay in something of a declivity, but for all that the thing must still have stretched a good three-quarters of a mile into the thin air, while its column was easily a third of that distance in diameter.
At this point something about the shape of the thing caused me to halt the clock's slow forward motion. It almost seemed as if I stood at the feet of a giant, and I had not yet made up my mind that this giant was friendly! Nor was this idea too far fetched, for indeed the shape of the thing, seen in silhouette, was somehow statuesque.
I decided to circle about it and thus observe it from a position where the dim sun would not be shining directly into my eyes, but no sooner had I taken this decision than yet another factor arose to deny me a clear, unobstructed view of the thing. The sun, climbing steadily now into the sky, was warming however remotely the tenuous air of the valley in which my giant stood. A fine mist was rising, clinging to and climbing the steep and strangely suggestive outlines of the structure, so that by the time I reached that point to the north from which I had hoped to view it, the combination of ground haze and rising, writhing vaporization had obscured all but its pointed summit. That summit, however, I could now see quite clearly: a great curve of a silvery hull and sharp prow tilted at the sky, sleek fins gleaming in the weak sunlight. A spaceship, held aloft in a giant's hand, symbol of man's domination of the stars and of his exodus from this dying Earth!
My heart gave a wild leap. This was more than I had dared hope for, better by far than the thought of the last members of the human race burrowing in the dry earth like so many miserable worms. Impatiently I waited while the sun completed its work and the feeble haze began to drift lazily down from the gargantuan it so thinly veiled. And soon those disturbing proportions I had noted before

began to emerge, but this time clearly and unmistakably to my shocked eyes!
My mouth went dry, my mind utterly blank in an instant. I could only stare . . . and stare . . . while my jaw dropped lower and lower and my hopes for mankind plummeted into unfathomable abysses. For perhaps a full half hour I stood there beside the clock, until, gripped by an emotion like none I had ever known before, I stumbled once more in through the panel of that purple-glowing gateway to forgotten times and places and carelessly hurled myself back, back into time, perhaps to a time when man lived and loved, fought and died and gloried on the green hills and in fertile valleys of Earth.
For the immense metal statue holding aloft that silvery symbol of galactic exodus was made neither by nor yet in the image of man. Vastly intelligent were its builders, yes, and plainly proud of their ancient heritage, a heritage which predated mere man and now patently antedated him . . . It was a beetle!

The Cretaceous
(From de Marigny's recordings)
Fortunately, de Marigny, prehistory and the flora and fauna of bygone ages were favorite subjects of mine in my younger days. I kept a tray of fossils at Biowne House for years, stony fragments I myself collected as a boy: ammonites and belemnites, a tiny bony fish from Eocene Leicestershire, a beautifully preserved 280,000,000-year-old trilobite from Permian Yorkshire, even Archaeopterix wing-fragments from the cycadeoid forests of the Jurassic. Traveling back through time in a blind panic-flight from the thought of those nameless beetle intelligences which at the last inherited the dying Earth and left a monument to indicate their galactic destiny, I had no idea that my more than average knowledge of the prehistoric world would be so soon put to practical use.
My plan - not really a plan as such, more an instinctive urge to get back to the eras of man - was simply to find a recognizable period of history. I would work my way back from there - perhaps I had better say work 'forward' - to my starting point, or even to a point a week or so after my departure in the time-machine. It all depended, of course, on if I was able to get the clock's mechanics down to such niceties! And while I talk about my panic-flight, still I was not in such a desperate hurry as to forget what happened toward the end of my first trip in time, when I almost overshot time itself. I was not about to make a second mistake of that nature, perhaps ending up in a mass of superheated plasma just recently hurled out from the sun!
Thus it was that after some time, rousing myself from a

state of morbid moodiness, I attempted to use the scanners. Now use of the scanners in normal circumstances -by that I mean during journeys in three-dimensional space - had proved to be comparatively easy, but traveling in time was a far different kettle of fish, and particularly traveling backward in time. Picture, if you can, a gigantic panoramic film run in reverse at many thousands of times its normal running speed and perhaps you'll understand
what I mean.
I had taken my craft up out of Earth's atmosphere. The sun and moon were no longer distinguishable as such but had become continuous lines of light weaving in fantastic patterns through space, similarly the whirling constellations. I could discern nothing of the Earth beneath me but a constant flurry of fantastically transient cloud patterns and a tidal blurring of the coastal regions between oceans and land masses. I slowed down and brought the clock lower into the atmosphere.
The sky immediately turned black, only to be lighted up a second later by an impossibly hurtling full moon, mercifully bright and yellow as I had always known it, as opposed to that pitted, leprous horror at the end of time. And then came an incredible blaze of sunlight as the familiar flaming orb of Sol shot up from the western horizon to race east across the sky. In another second it grew dark again, and then once more the moon rocketed
into view.
Here was an interesting point. Because I was not seeing all this with my eyes but psychically, there was no retinal image left to distort my view of Earth during the fleeting periods of darkness. It was because I saw something during this sequence of dark periods that I slowed down even further. I glimpsed a row of red and yellow lights blazing in a line that from my height seemed certain to be artificial, like some vast system of street lighting. I was

wrong, and but for the clock's near invulnerability the end of my adventures in space and time would have come right there and then!
The Earth of course was stationary below. I mean that the clock was making its own compensations for planetary motion; it was rotating through space with the Earth, directly over that spot I had fled from in the now far distant future. So I plunged lower still through the dense stuff of what I took to be clouds. Too late I realized that this was not cloud but tephra, and that directly below me the throat of a monster volcano was belching lava-bombs, smoke and fire at me in a spectacular eruption. The row of lights was simply a great volcanic rift in the earth, from which at fairly regularly spaced points in its length the cones of active volcanoes thrust threateningly upward. Lightning flashed ceaselessly in the roiling tephra clouds, striking the time-clock again and again before I had recovered my wits sufficiently to move my machine laterally out of the way.
But about that volcano, de Marigny, and particularly about the lightning - just try to picture it! Of course I was still traveling backward in time, and so the lava-bombs were all hurtling up toward the clock from an area outside the actual radius of the volcano, to fall into its heaving, bubbling throat. And the lightning was not striking at me from the tephra clouds but seemed to be striking from the clock to the clouds! In any event I was unharmed, and the clock was barely scratched.
Once clear of the volcanic range I slowed my temporal speed more yet until the moon hung still and bright, if redly tinged, in a sky so dark that the stars seemed merely to flicker dimly above, and then only with difficulty. I brought the clock down to a landing there when I judged that dawn was not far away, but I stayed in the clock until the sun was fully up. My reason for doing this was very