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

. . . many months. For a period I was even driven to consider violence upon the person of Felicius Tetricus himself, but when the opportunity came I could not bring myself to do it. And by then the old man was absolutely convinced that I was his son, Titus Tetricus, returned to him by the gods.
And yet the year had not been wasted, for I had struck up a firm friendship with the Roman philosopher, Lollius Urbicus (not to be confused with Q. Lollius Urbicus, who was to become Antonius Pius' governor of Britain in 139 A.D.) whose truly remarkable erudition and magnetic personality suited my own mental attitudes very well. At the same time, yet on an entirely different level, I had managed to find many outlets for that physical abundance built into me by T3RE. I was a man in my prime, with the strength and stamina of three men.
Much to Felicius' alarm I had taken up chariot racing and wrestling, all the sports of the games, and I had quickly grown to excel in them all. I had been tutored in the use of the shortsword and in the heavier British blade, even in the Scottish and Pictish long-handled ax. There came a time when it seemed that there was no weapon I could not master, but all of ...
. . . instincts and love of knowledge always took me back to the sparse household of Lollius Urbicus, and there I would bury my frustrations in long hours of discussion and simple contemplation of the nature of ...

Oh, certainly Felicius Tetricus tried to win me over. There was, for instance, always a party at the villa; the women he made arrangements with for my amusement ran from the wives of officers engaged on supervisory duties at the Wall to expensive local whores whose wares would have tempted any man, except perhaps one whose dreams were haunted by the face and form of a goddess. No, try as he might to make me his son, the weeks found me spending more and more of my time with Lollius Urbicus, with whom I had developed scholarly links completely transcending two thousand years of time and vast differences of creed, society and similar mundane concepts.
And it was in this affinity of mine with the Roman philosopher whose book, Frontier Garrison, back in the . . . seeds of a dilemma within a dilemma were sown, and they were seeds that grew and blossomed strangely in the end.
5 The Great Race
. . . that this Earth of ours was inhabited by many intelligent races before Man, some of them malign, as the Cthulhu Spawn, others benign and . . .
... in the writings of the elder Peaslee, Wingate's father, particularly in what he wrote of his peculiar amnesia during the years 1908-13 . . . that one of Win-gate's principal interests had always lain in the Great Sandy Desert. Of course I can see that you are wondering just what all this has to do with my life in the villa of Felicius Tetricus in 125 A.D.. I will tell you.
I have mentioned this almost psychic affinity of mine

with the Roman philosopher Lollius Urbicus, the similarity in our thinking and the primal puzzles to which our minds were drawn as one. Now I want you to picture, way back in the dim mists of time, a great race of scientists dwelling upon the primordial landmass of Australia, which was yet to sink beneath the waves and rise again several times before the first man walked the Earth. This race is lost to man except in the most ancient of desert ruins, whose hints of an antediluvian super-civilization are
mind-staggering.
These beings, creatures of multiple appendages that
walked in much the same manner as garden snails and
talked by clicking great claws, stood ten feet tall and were
ten feet wide at the bases of their rugose, conical bodies.
They had developed instruments through which they
could send their minds out into space, or into the past or
future, to displace the minds of other sentient beings and
replace them. When this happened the displaced minds
took up habitation in the conical bodies of the usurping
Great Race. In this way scientists of the Great Race
collected knowledge of all future and past civilizations, of
every planet within range of their mind-swapping
machines. And always they were on the lookout for fresh
bodies to inhabit, young races into which, should the need
arise, they might project their own minds en masse. As
to ...
. . . but Lollius! How it happened I will never know, but where it had undoubtedly been their intention to reach out from the dim past of 500,000,000 years ago to exchange a mind with my philosopher friend, well, the Great Race got me instead! To be a man, deep in silent contemplation the one minute - and in the next to find oneself inhabiting the body of some monstrous slug! The shock was tremendous, and were it not for the sheer stability of the shape of my new body I am sure I would

have fallen over in a faint. There was no suggestion that this might be a dream or an hallucination; I knew immediately that it ...
... to record the history of my own civilization, the Roman race, and in that instant I knew that I was the victim of a terrible mistake: I knew that Lollius Urbicus should be there in my place. But what to do? And what would become of me if these beings should suddenly discover that I was not the Roman philosopher they thought I was? I decided that for the moment I would attempt to bluff my way through, at least until I could see which way the ...
. . . minds of divers races from every conceivable epoch of Earth time, and from hundreds of inhabited planets scattered throughout . . .
... conversed with the group-mind of members of a hybrid polyp race whose home world had been a moon of Mercury ages before it was drawn into the sun's destroying furnace; with the minds of two intelligent reptile creatures from dimly fabulous Valusia; with the utterly alien consciousness of a semi-vegetable entity whose hibernating body slumbered at the core of a vast comet which would not end its journey for ten million years, when at last its passenger would awaken. I talked with the mind of a Cimmerian chieftain, Crom-Ya, of prehistoric Northumberland; with that of Khephnes, an erudite Egyptian of the Fourteenth Dynasty; and with the mind of Wolfred Herman Freimann, who fought the Romans in the passes of the Teutoberger Wald. There were intelligences from . . .
... but that eventually . . .
. . . through me as easily as a windowpane. In a state of terrific apprehension I was taken before a council of scientists whose prime purpose and task was the correlation of the ages, the Masters of the Archives. And when

they began to question me, then I knew that my problems were only just beginning. They wanted to know who I was and from which era of Earth's future. Then, when I answered, they desired to know how the mind of a man from the twentieth century could possibly have been drawn back from Roman Britain in the year 125 A.D.? . . . nothing else for it but to tell them of my travels through time and space in search of my own era, which I had fled in the face of insuperable adversity. And so ... . . . the time, during my examination, I was conscious of a kind of derision in the council members, frankly of their disbelief. Obviously they had made a great mistake, and plainly my story was one huge fabrication. Perhaps I was the philosopher they had sought, but the business of mind-transference had driven me insane. This was surely the only reasonable explanation, for even with all the technological advances the Great Race had made in the course of a million years of migration across the universe, not even they had discovered how to project their bodies through time, only their minds. How then could so rudely fashioned a being as myself have ... and then built a machine with which to ...
And that was when I broke in on them. I think I would rather be struck in the face than ridiculed, de Marigny, for ... be made sport of by these vast intelligences, even knowing them to be incredibly superior intellectually to any man, was just too much to bear. I told them that I was not the builder of a machine for traveling through time, but that I had simply discovered the machine and learned its intricacies over many years. This interested them. What form did this machine take, they desired to know, and how had I discovered its use? And so I ...
. . . such confusion! At first I couldn't understand it, but then it dawned on me that these mighty beings actually stood in awe of me! It had been when I mentioned

the hieroglyphs about the time-clock's face, and the weird sweep of its four hands. That was when they had started to sit up and listen. And no wonder, for . . .
'. . . of the Elder Gods themselves!' said their spokesman. 'If you have learned to use one of their devices, then you yourself are of their kin. Only the finest of minds are capable even of knowing of their existence. We know of them, and we are to them what microbes are to us.' Then this great cone-creature began to cast patently fearful glances all about the great auditorium in which I stood. 'They are all-seeing, all-knowing,' he told me. 'They may be watching all that happens here even now!'
And the idea of these tremendous beings trembling at the thought of being observed about their business by the Elder Gods, and thrown into a panic that perhaps in the transference of my mind they had erred against the will of those Elder Gods, made me quickly reply: 'Yes, they probably are, and I don't think they'll be at all happy about this!'
'But you should have mentioned this earlier!' the spokesman protested. 'You have been here for three days now, and -'
'Three days of my time wasted, of their time!' I shot back.
'Will you allow us to make amends?' the agitated being asked me. 'We will send you back to your rightful body immediately.'
And that was when a wonderful idea occurred to me, a frightening idea, too, for I wasn't at all sure that it could work. But it was at least worth a try. 'I do not wish to be transferred directly back to my body,' I told them. 'I want you to transfer my mind back to the time-clock!'