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

'He is most human, this man; the blood of his own kind is stronger than ours in him. His mind may not be able to guide his vessel away from the Black Hole. You may only join him in spirit - true - but such is the pull of the Black Hole that even your spirit may find itself fast. If you cannot help him - if you fail - then you go down to the Black Hole with him!'
'I know it, yet I must go to him, now, before it is too late!'
'And you desire my help?' 'Oh, yes, Kthanid, yes!' 7 cannot deny you, therefore I will help you. It has long

been my thought that he may be - great - this man. I sense his presence even now. I suspect that you are his magnet even as he is yours. If indeed he has the germ of greatness within him, then it would be a matter of great neglect not to help you. So ride the thought-winds, child - and hold fast to this Great Thought 1 send you, to help you on your way!'
Instantly the lights in her eyes went out, her lashes furled down like the silken sails of faerie ships. She sighed once, deeply, then gently curled herself about the crystal sphere, its orb cloudy now and empty of visions.
And abruptly the scene contracted, shrank, as if a giant's hand had snatched me up from it. The beautiful creature curled upon the great cushion melted to a tiny halo of life about a glowing seed-pearl; the alcove of the Eminence dwindled and its misty drapes became as the tiny, dew-spangled webs of dwarf spiders; I passed into the vaulted ceiling of rose crystal and my dream collapsed in the wake of returning consciousness.
I awakened in the clock with a cry of pain, pain that I was separated from the woman of the dream.
Dream? Had it been a dream?

Marooned in Prehistory
(From de Marigny's recordings)
Hours later, after I had breakfasted and flown the clock down to the wet sand where the sea now sullenly retreated, while I absentmindedly gathered gem-tinted shells unknown to man except as drab and colorless rocks, I still pondered the dream or vision, whichever it had been. So engrossed was I with it that I passed off the first trembling of the earth beneath my feet as normal volcanic activity; such seismic shocks must be frequent in an area literally riddled with volcanic vents.
With a thousand damp and glistening shells in the bowl of a broken nut, lifting my eyes from the contours of the conches to the line of smoking hills, I felt that pulse of Earth and strangely it set off chords of memory. The voice of the girl, the woman, the goddess in my dream had been . . . had been the same voice that came to me as I crashed headlong into the future in the clock, as I hurtled toward the End! It had been that voice of warning I heard even as I applied mental brakes against the closing of time! But who, where, what was she? And she had said she loved me ...
Now why should I connect a warning of disaster from a beautiful creature of dreams with a volcanic rumbling deep in the ground? Was it simply a hangover from my past experience of the burrowers beneath, the automatic suggestion of danger in connection with any movements of the earth? Or was it something deeper, of the subconscious? Perhaps I had better get back to my clock.
Wasting no more time in pondering the enigma, I tucked my shell collection up under one arm and set off

briskly back toward the time-clock. Even as I started out there came again that subterranean trembling, accompanied this time by a low and ominous rumbling. Black smoke coiled up now from several pinnacles and crests along the line of low hills, and as I lengthened my pace to a clumsy run across the damp sand there came a loud explosion from out at sea, and then an even louder one, followed by a tremendous blast that threw me down on the sand while the earth commenced a violent shaking.
There followed such a hissing and crackling that I immediately turned my face toward the sea, to the source of these threatening sounds. A fantastic manifestation drew my awed attention. Something was beginning to happen out there, something preceded by a flash of lightning from a sky already darkly turbulent and accompanied by a mad swirl and rush of ocean, a sudden howling of wind and a column of smoke and tephra that reached up into the sky with astonishing speed. Then, through the smoke and abruptly hissing rain, I saw the outline of a tremendous bulk steaming up from the sea. A newborn island, crying out as it struggled from its watery womb!
Shuddering, jerking, a massive pinnacle of gray-black rock and slag was climbing from the boiling waters. And flame, too, gouting up redly in a sudden barrage of liquid rock from the emerging volcano, blasting down in the form of white lightning from a now blue-black sky. And water - a shock wave of panicked ocean!
The clock, my one means of returning from this place, from the Cretaceous back to the ages of man, lay directly in the path of a fearful wall of water that even now heaped itself up far out at sea to begin the awesome plunge landward. Despite the lurching of the earth beneath me as I struggled to my feet, despite the sucking of the wet, quaking sand, I tried to run. Perhaps I might have made

it back to my vessel in time if yet another tremendous seismic shock had not chosen that exact moment to throw me down once more in the sand and pebbles.
And I was still there, some fifteen to twenty yards away from my coffin-shaped refuge, when the great wave crashed down on me, crushing me to the beach until I thought I must drown, then sucking me up and hurling me headlong on its rushing crest until finally I was thrown down again in a clump of great palms. There, as the first rush of water subsided, I managed to cling to the bole of one of the primal trees and so save myself.
There was no chance yet to spot my vessel amid the crazed howling of the elements. Stumbling out from under the lashing palm branches toward higher ground, it was all I could do to support myself against the tearing wind. Oh, of course my concern for the clock was of the greatest - I was filled with a terror of my vessel being lost forever - but even so the instinct for immediate personal survival was uppermost. Glancing back as I stumblingly climbed the gradual slopes, I could see that a series of secondary shock waves was already forming concentric circles about the island out at sea; it would not be long before they, too, rushed in to further flood the lowland areas.
Well, time passed. Though those lesser shock waves did not reach as high as the first, still they continued to form until well into the afternoon. Watching from my vantage point in the foothills, I saw them breaking all through the day in gradually lessening fury along the great curve of the beach in both directions. The ground rumblings had eventually ceased, too, as had the sporadic eruptions in the hills behind me. The newborn island stood steady now in the gray sea, sullenly smoldering.
A sort of lava dam had been created out in the ocean, forming a great basin in which those waters thrown

landward by the initial emergence of the volcano were trapped. Also, it seemed that the shoreline must have settled somewhat, for while the arms of this newly formed bay did not completely shut off the stretch of water between the new island and the mainland, still that water did not seem to be receding to its previous level. And if the ocean did not recede . . .
My God, Henri, but that was a monstrous thought! To be trapped here in the Cretaceous, with my time-clock lost beneath the shallow but viciously denizened waters of this volcanic bay, in a prehistoric world of great beasts and primal plants. What chance would a mere man have in a world ruled by dinosaurs, an age of constant struggle for survival? And there I was, stranded in those Cretaceous foothills, with afternoon all too quickly growing into murky evening.
As night drew near and the elements less wild, the hum of insects and raucous cries of bat-lizards began to come in to me from the surrounding wilderness of foggy heights and crags, particularly from the now heavily misted beach. Of course! Down there must be a wonderful feast of stranded fishes, mollusks and crustaceans for the pterano-dons; indeed 1 could see large numbers of the flying lizards flapping in from over the ocean as the warm, heavy haze of the beach developed into a full blown fog.
Now, complementing the clinging clouds of moisture-laden air that rolled up from the sullenly washing ocean, there came the odor of things too long out of water, a far stronger smell than I had ever known in London's fish markets. Little wonder that the flying lizards had been attracted so soon to the scene of the recent upheaval. 1 would not be able to go back down to the beach tonight, perhaps not even tomorrow. But what was this? Here I was sitting in these foothills, surrounded by a rapidly thickening wall of fog while night quickly set in, dreaming

like a madman of tomorrow! My God! Would there be another tomorrow for me?
Quickly I found myself a tiny cave in a steep escarpment of rock, large enough to cram myself into but leaving no room for anything so superfluous as comfort. Then, marking the location of my shelter, I left it again to search out a great palm leaf from which to strip a long, sharp, pliant splinter: a weapon against any unwelcome attentions I might attract from night-wandering beasts of prey. Still feeling far from safe, and while there was yet enough light, I sought out from the volcanic shale of those foothills a flat slab of slate about the size and thickness of a paving stone. A further twenty minutes of pushing and struggling saw me inhabiting my uncomfortable hole in the rocks, weapon in hand and pointing out through a narrow crack between the edge of my new slab door and the side of my tiny cave. As darkness fell, miserable though I was and - I freely admit it - desperately afraid, I finally fell into fitful slumbers.
Twice during that dreadful night I awakened, once to the eerie creaking of leathery wings overhead - a sound that had my nerves silently screaming for at least ten minutes before it finally faded into the background hum of night insects - and the second time when something tugged at my sharp fang of palm splinter where it pro-jected slightly from its aperture. A nervous, involuntary thrust of this weapon as I awoke sent whatever creature it had been - possibly one of those tree-dwelling mammals I have previously mentioned, certainly nothing very large - scampering off unseen with a shrill cry of fear and pain into the night mists.
By midmorning the fog had dispersed and the sun was blazing down from a sky of purest blue. The last of the

gorged pteranodons, their sac-like bellies grotesquely distended, had flapped away along the beach or out to sea. Behind me, higher up in the hills, solitary smudges of smoke drifted lazily above volcanic sources. It seemed completely impossible that only a few short hours ago Nature had displayed such a disastrous fury of elemental creation, and yet now a great new stretch of ocean lay fiat and calm, lapping at the edge of those fringing palm groves that, so recently had stood well back from the beach. I calculated that the waters had crept at least one hundred and fifty yards further inland from the level at which I had last seen my clock.
I made my way slowly down to the beach, picking a path through an appalling assortment of rotting, ravaged marine corpses of various sizes, from tiny translucent bony fishes to shark-like things up to eight or nine feet in length, to the water's edge. The sea, as I have said, was flat and blue, mirroring the sky. An occasional fish could be observed to leap clear of the warm waters in a burst of desperate acceleration as it fled from greater dwellers in those sparkling shallows. Even as I watched a particularly ugly, square, serpent-like head viciously broke the surface only a few score yards out from where I stood.
I shuddered despite the fact that the weather was so nearly tropical as to drench the deteriorating rags of my clothes in perspiration. I had been thinking of swimming out there, of making a series of dives until I found my clock. It was out of the question - I might make twenty-five yards if I was lucky! On the other hand, why couldn't I build a raft and simply paddle out until I could actually see the clock in those crystal waters? That way I would only have to risk one solitary dive. I refused even to consider the possibility that my vessel might not work under water! But if I did build a raft, would I find the time-clock in the place where I believed it to be? What if

yesterday's upheaval and tremendous shock waves had moved it, perhaps even burying it beneath the silt of this shallow seabed?
Well, that last was a distinct possibility certainly, but it was no kind of thought to dwell on for any length of time. A raft would at least enable me to find out one way or the other.
I looked around with more purpose now. Following yesterday's violence the sea, despite whatever life-and-death turbulence there might be beneath the surface, had grown singularly calm. All along its quiet edge giant palm branches were strewn; it should not be too difficult to lash two or three of these together.
A sudden rage came over me and I cursed the newborn volcano, shaking my fist at it where -
The creak of leathery, membranous wings drew my instantly terrified eyes from their angry contemplation of the smoldering infant cone standing out in the sea's blue expanse to the skies directly above me. Winging down in a narrowing spiral came one of those hideous, hammer-headed scavenger-lizards, a pteranodon, blotting out the sun with its shadow as it descended directly toward me. Without a doubt, I was the thing's target; it uttered a hungry, raucous cry and its eyes, red as the pits of hell, burned unblinkingly on me as it fell from the sky. I felt the cooling fan of its great wings, with a span all of twenty-five feet, and then I ran wildly, desperately along the edge of the water.
Closer yet the wings of that pursuing horror beat at the air, until one of them struck me like a leather club as I zigzagged amid the rotting refuse of the recent upheaval, sending me sprawling with my head and shoulders penetrating the spear-like fronds of a fallen giant palm branch. Quickly I scrambled into the shade of the branch, pressing my body to the wider stem and peering up through the

lesser leaves at the sky-lizard as it settled in a violent stirring of rancid seaweed and damp sand to lean its evil head inquiringly forward in avid contemplation of my