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

'But what else of the Foundation?' I impatiently asked when he was done. 'How far have you gone in ten years? What successes, what failures? What new knowledge? Have you found R'lyeh in the Pacific? And Shudde-M'ell - what of the Prime Burrower now? God, Peaslee, but I'm dying to know everything. Ten years - I've lost ten years!'
'Whoa!' The professor held up his hands. 'Slow down. I'll tell you everything, of course, but it's best if I start with what we have not done. For instance, we have not found

R'lyeh, no, and that in turn leads us to believe that the Johansen Narrative is at fault - not in its premise that a fantastic city of alien dimensions, angles and proportions exists beneath the Pacific - but that the specific island which rose up from the ocean floor in 1925 was R'lyeh, and that its hellish denizen was Cthulhu. That it was one of the Cthulhu spawn seems a certainty, but Great Cthulhu himself? We doubt it. You may research it for yourself, Henri. The Foundation did long ago. Basically Johansen's story is this:
'On March 23rd, 1925, at latitude 47░9' south, longitude 126░43', the Alert, under Johansen's command and in those waters following a series of complicated misadventures that had left her wildly off course, landed on a small island where an island had never been sighted before. Now the sea in that area is two thousand fathoms deep. It is on the very edge of the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge, which falls away to three thousand fathoms and even deeper. The area is not noticeably volcanic, and in any case a cataclysm of sufficient force to bring even a small area of the ocean floor to the surface would without a shadow of a doubt have been recorded. So it would seem we might throw out the fanciful Johansen Narrative forthwith, except that the Foundation, like Charles Fort, prefers to make its own decisions!
'The buckling of the Pacific floor, in places more a stretching, as Australia tends northward in the continental drift, has been very pronounced in the area of the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge since early Miocene times. The island that rose in March, 1925, was in fact a phenomenon of this geologically prolonged buckling, and its disappearance again shortly thereafter may be put down to similar seismic forces.'
'I've read Fort too,' I remarked dryly, 'and I think he'd have taken exception to what you just said, Wingate.'
'Eh? Oh, of course, so he would - if we hadn't sent

down bathyspheres at that precise point just three years ago, and if we hadn't discovered what we did.'
'Go on,' I said, putting my plate aside at last. 'What did you find?'
'Our first bell was simply, well, a diving-bell, nothing more. A device lowered into the sea to record with cameras whatever it saw. It hit bottom at only two hundred fathoms, at the very peak of the submarine range, which is now, incidentally, quickly sinking back into the deeps. But before we lost it we were afforded fantastic glimpses the like of which - '
'Lost it?' I interrupted.
'Yes.' He nodded grimly. 'We lost it. Cables wrenched loose, bell smashed to smithereens - and a structure capable of withstanding thousands of tons of pressure at that! We recovered fragments later, fantastically dented, gnawed and crushed. A sea-shoggoth, we're inclined to believe, perhaps a number of them, about their immemorial task of protecting and worshiping their dreaming masters, the spawn of Cthulhu.
'I went down in the second bell myself -'
'You did what?' Again I cut him off, marveling that he could so blandly admit what seemed like the most colossal lunacy.
He offered me an ancient, wrinkled grin and leaned over to tap a fingernail on the surface of the star-stone where I had replaced it by the flower vase. 'Aren't you forgetting something, Henri? Yes? Well, then, as I was saying . . .
'It was three months later. We were ostensibly charting the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge. I went down with two younger men from Miskatonic in a powered bathysphere that was really more of a submarine. We had the protection of a number of star-stones, of course, but nevertheless the weather was bad and we'd been dogged by

troubles all the way out from Boston: storms, mists, accidents, etc. Mind you, we were not so naive as to believe that such troubles were merely coincidental. We've learned a lot since the old Sea-Maid days . . .
'There was a particularly heavy swell on the sea and an ominous mist that morning, but our telepaths on board the mother ship were all alert. Besides, we had massed what protective devices we could against any possible interference by the dark forces. Our little vessel fell away from the Surveyor, on loan to Miskatonic University from the American Oceanographic Society, and sank slowly down in a controlled, spiraling dive to the bottom. That bottom was in fact a top, the top of a range which may one day rise again, and permanently. If so, it will stretch from somewhere about three thousand miles west of Freemantle - or where Freemantle is now - to Easter Island, over ten thousand miles away. Indeed Easter Island, New Zealand, the Pitcairns and certain other island groups may well form its highest peaks. Somewhere in that vast range R'lyeh may rise too, and other cities of the Cthulhu spawn, like the one we found there two hundred and fifty fathoms down beneath the Surveyor.
'The place was . . . fantastic! We saw it in the beams of our powerful searchlights almost as it must have been in its Azoic heyday over a billion years ago. It was crusted, certainly, with millions of centuries of oceanic growths, but its sheer unthinkable size had defied all but a minimal obliteration of outline through the aeons.
'We saw the immense carved doors with their symbols of the Cthulhu spawn, the great squid-dragon bas-reliefs mentioned in Johansen; we noted and grew sick and dizzy at the madness of elusive angles that refused to stay either convex or concave but seemed to alter of their own accord, as in optical illusions. Despite our protective star-stones, we shuddered at the lurking menace, the morbidly

insane horror still inherent in these colossal, monolithic structures of non-Euclidean architecture.
'The extent of these upper ramparts of the city - for want of a better word - was perhaps nine or ten acres, and this was without doubt that same shockingly alien buttress which had formed Johansen's island. But the crazy staircases and mammoth monoliths falling away on all sides, swimming down in seemingly endless tiers . . . Without descending to greater depths yet, even our powerful searchlights could only hint at the outlines of these leviathan levels. That city - if I may still apply a word which, smacks of teeming, mundane life to such a nighted necropolis of the undead - must have been immense beyond words, reaching down into the roots of the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge itself.
'Myself, I believe I might have stayed longer, explored further and deeper, but the third member of my crew, young Ridgeway, had worked himself into such a state that to extend our visit was plainly out of the question. Ridgeway is a telepath, you see, which helps considerably in his work at Miskatonic, where he's a professor of psychology. Down there in the depths, however, with God-only-knows-what lurking behind those colossal stone blocks and hideously carved doors, well, he just couldn't take it. Without the star-stones there can be little doubt that he'd have been a mindless jelly in a matter of minutes. As it was he was hard enough put to keep from screaming. You remember what happened to poor Finch when he deliberately went deep into the mind of that horror beneath the Yorkshire Dales? This would have been just as bad, except Ridgeway was doing his best to keep the telepathic sendings of the Cthulhu spawn out of his mind, while yet trying to gauge their mood. And their mood was ugly, you may depend upon it.

'So finally we set out for the surface and poor Ridgeway, his face horribly screwed up, unable to speak coherently, sank into a corner of our craft. And then we saw them. The guardians of the tombs, the watchers through the immemorial night of the Cthulhu spawn, the most blasphemous shapes you could ever imagine! Sea-shog-goths, dozens of them, held back by our star-stones just as we once held off that smaller specimen from your boat Seafree at Henley. But these were giants of their type, de Marigny, the royal guards of the kings of evil. Mountains of protoplasmic filth floundered and wallowed in the depths like cosmic corks in the whirlpool of Andromeda! And even knowing that we were safe, still I was relieved that they kept their distance, and even more relieved when at last the keel of the Surveyor opened to receive us.
'Our excursion into the deeps had been brief, but we had seen enough. Since then, of course, the Foundation has -'
'Let me guess,' I quickly interrupted. 'A further series of atomic tests in the Pacific, particularly in that region?'
'No, no, out of the question. We're no longer allowed to toss atomics around willy-nilly, Henri. No, but there's more than one way to skin a cat. We simply peppered the entire submarine range with radioactives of a very short half-life, quite definitely sufficient to destroy most of the shoggoth cultures, but not of a duration to permanently damage other marine life. We couldn't hope to get all of the shoggoths, of course - there are too many millions of square miles of ocean. And it's very likely that we didn't get a single one of the Cthulhi within their incredible vaults and sepulchers, but certainly we must at the very least have raised all hell down there. Cthulhi, by the way, is our most recent name for the Cthulhu species itself, as opposed to the CCD in general. No, there was little

chance of getting them all, and of course our actions were governed considerably by the laws of ecology; that is, we had no desire to sterilize the entire Pacific! And so, as I've said, we simply peppered that known range and other suspect places, doing our best at the same time to avoid harming areas of exotic marine life. But, in any case, there's not a great deal of life as we normally think of it at that depth.'
'Oh?' I showed my surprise. 'Three hundred fathoms?'
'Very little lives down there, de Marigny,' he insisted, 'and there's less the deeper you go. You have to remember that Johansen's island was only the veriest tip of a great peak. The rest of that particular city just went down and down and down, to regions where there could not possibly be any other life but . . . theirs. We calculate that there could be anything up to half a million square miles of city under the Pacific, and maybe as much again in other oceans! While we still don't dare let our telepaths play about too much with the Cthulhi, nevertheless we have reason to believe that there could be as many as five hundred individuals of that species imprisoned in the great deeps. Cthulhu, the prime member himself, the race-father of course, is only one of them, though in all probability he's the oldest, the most powerful and the nastiest. Possibly he was the very first of them to arrive on Earth when they seeped down from the stars, long before the soup of terrene life felt the first stab of generative sunlight.'
I heard the professor out, but in effect he had left me behind over a hundred words earlier. 'Half a million square miles.' I eventually repeated the statement that held me in so much awe. 'A whole damn continent of sunken tombs. But that's' - I made rough, rapid calculations - 'some five times the size of Great Britain!'
'My dear Henri,' the professor sighed, inclining his

head at me, 'much as it pains me to belittle your Great Britain, in the so much vaster scheme of things she's a tiny pebble in a very large pond. Any one of a hundred trenches in the floor of the Pacific could swallow her whole, without raising the merest ripple on the surface. We are talking about an ocean that covers tens of millions of square miles - hundreds of millions of cubic miles of water!'
I knew that he was right, of course, but nevertheless my mind boggled at the figures. I whistled softly and echoed him yet again: 'A pebble in a pond - Great Britain!'

4 Of the CCD in England
(From de Marigny's notebooks)
Then I turned my mind to other questions. 'While we're on the subject of Britain, what about Crow's warning that you'd need to take another look there? I remember he mentioned Silbury Hill, Stonehenge, Avebury, Hadrian's Wall and certain other places in the Severn Valley and the Cotswolds. Did you ever get around to them?'
Peaslee frowned. 'Yes, we did take another look at the British Isles, and we found various trouble spots that we'd somehow overlooked before. In the vicinity of Hadrian's Wall, for instance, not all that far out of Newcastle, there is a gate to an outer dimension, to one of the more remote prisons of the Elder Gods. This gate is, well, locked, I suppose you'd say. Lollius Urbicus in his Frontier Garrison tells us that it was opened at least once in his time, probably on a number of occasions. Urbicus wrote that circa 183 A.D., "the barbarians were wont to call out devils which they sent against us; they called them out from the air and beneath the ground, and one such which they sent killed half a centuria of soldiers before falling to their
swords."
'Now what do you make of that? Plainly these barbarians Urbicus mentions must have been early British -Scottish? - dupes of the CCD. Not so rare or strange, really. There are records to show that the Ptetholites were similarly employed by the CCD thousands of years before Urbicus. They, too, were adept at calling up dark forces. Oh, yes, your witches and warlocks were real enough, Henri, but their magic was simply a vastly alien science. 'Titus Crow had a copy of Frontier Garrison, to say

nothing of certain far more conclusive and damnable reliquiae of those times; it surprises me he never mentioned the subject to you.'