"A. E. Merritt - The Moon Pool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

Pursuing my search to Sydney I was doubly fortunate in finding a firm who were
expecting these very articles in a consignment due them from the States within a
fortnight. I settled down in strictest seclusion to await their arrival.
And now it will occur to you to ask why I did not cable, during this period of
waiting, to the Association; demand aid from it. Or why I did not call upon
members of the University staffs of either Melbourne or Sydney for assistance.
At the least, why I did not gather, as Throckmartin had hoped to do, a little
force of strong men to go with me to the Nan-Matal.
To the first two questions I answer franklyЧI did not dare. And this reluctance,
this inhibition, every man jealous of his scientific reputation will understand.
The story of Throckmartin, the happenings I had myself witnessed, were
incredible, abnormal, outside the facts of all known science. I shrank from the
inevitable disbelief, perhaps ridiculeЧnay, perhaps even the graver suspicion
that had caused me to seal my lips while on the ship. Why I myself could only
half believe! How then could I hope to convince others?
And as for the third questionЧI could not take men into the range of such a
peril without first warning them of what they might encounter; and if I did warn
themЧЧ
It was checkmate! If it also was cowardiceЧwell, I have atoned for it. But I do
not hold it so; my conscience is clear.
That fortnight and the greater part of another passed before the ship I awaited
steamed into port. By that time, between my straining anxiety to be after
Throckmartin, the despairing thought that every moment of delay might be vital
to him and his, and my intensely eager desire to know whether that shining,
glorious horror on the moon path did exist or had been hallucination, I was worn
almost to the edge of madness.
At last the condensers were in my hands. It was more than a week later, however,
before I could secure passage back to Port Moresby and it was another week still
before I started north on the Suwarna, a swift little sloop with a
fifty-horsepower auxiliary, heading straight for Ponape and the Nan-Matal.
We sighted the Brunhilda some five hundred miles south of the Carolines. The
wind had fallen soon after Papua had dropped astern. The Suwarna's ability to
make her twelve knots an hour without it had made me very fully forgive her for
not being as fragrant as the Javan flower for which she was named. Da Costa, her
captain, was a garrulous Portuguese; his mate was a Canton man with all the
marks of long and able service on some pirate junk; his engineer was a
half-breed China-Malay who had picked up his knowledge of power plants, Heaven
alone knew where, and, I had reason to believe, had transferred all his
religious impulses to the American built deity of mechanism he so faithfully
served. The crew was made up of six huge, chattering Tonga boys.
The Suwarna had cut through Finschafen Huon Gulf to the protection of the
Bismarcks. She had threaded the maze of the archipelago tranquilly, and we were
then rolling over the thousand-mile stretch of open ocean with New Hanover far
behind us and our boat's bow pointed straight toward Nukuor of the Monte Verdes.
After we had rounded Nukuor we should, barring accident, reach Ponape in not
more than sixty hours.
It was late afternoon, and on the demure little breeze that marched behind us
came far-flung sighs of spice-trees and nutmeg flowers. The slow prodigious
swells of the Pacific lifted us in gentle, giant hands and sent us as gently
down the long, blue wave slopes to the next broad, upward slope. There was a