"Moore, C L - Dust of Gods UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

The raw - whisper rasped to a crescendo; fanatic lights flared in the small, bright eyes. He had forgotten them entirelyЧhis piercing stare fixed on some shining future, and his hands on the table clenched into white-knuckled fists. - .
Smith and Yarol exchanged dubious glances. Obviously the man was mad. .. .
УFifty thousand dollars to your account in any bank you choose,Ф the hoarse voice, eminently sane, broke in abruptly upon their dubiety. УAll expenses, of course, will be paid. IТll give you charts and tell you all I know about how to get there. When can you start?Ф
Smith grinned. Touched the man might be, but just then
Smith would have stormed the gates of hell, at any madmanТs request, for fifty thousand Earth dollars.
УRight nqw,Фhe said laconically. УLetТs go.Ф
LI -

Northward over the great curve of Mars, red slag and red dust and the reddish, low-lying dryland vegetation gave way to the saltlands around the Pole. Scrub grows there, and sparse, coarse grass, and the snow that falls by night lies all the cold, thin day among the tough grass-roots and in~-the hillocks of the dry salt soil.
УOf all the God-forsaken countries,Ф said Northwest Smith, looking down from his pilot seat at the gray lands slipping past under the speed of their plane, Уthis must be theWorst. IТd sooner live on Luna oi~ one of the asteroids.Ф
Yarol tilted the segir bottle to his lips and evoked an eloquent gurgle from its depths.
УFive days of flying over this scenery would give anyone (he jitters,Ф he pronounced. УIТd never have thought IТd be glad to see a mountain range as ugly as that, but it looks like Paradise now,Ф and he nodded toward the black, jagged slopes of the polar mountails that marked their journey Сsend so far as flying was concerned; for despite their great antiquity the peaks were jagged and rough as mountains newwrenched frOm a heaving world.
Smith brought the plane down at the foot of the rising black slopes. There was a triangular gap there with a streak of white down its side, a landmark he had been watching for, and the plane slid quietly into the shelter to lie protected under the shelving rock. From here progress must be made afoot and painfully through the mountains. Thete was no landing-place any nearer their goal than this. Yet in measure of distance they had not far to go.
The two climbed stiffly out. Smith stretched his long legs and sniffed the air. It was bitterly cold, and tingedwith that nameless, dry salt smell of eon-dead seas which is encoun
tered nowhere in the known universe save in the northern saltiands of Mars. He faced the mountains doubtfully. From their beginnings here, he knew, they rolled away, jagged and black and deadly, to the very Pole. Snow lay thickly upon them in the brief Martian winter, unmarked by any track until it melted for the canals, carving deeper runnels into the already jig-sawed peaks.
Once in the very long-past days, so the little whispering fanatic had said, Mars was a green world. Seas had spread here, lapping the feet of gentler mountains, and in the slopes. of those hills a mighty city once layЧa nameless city, so far as the present generations of man remembered, and a nameless star shone down upon it from a spot in the heavens now emptyЧthe Lost Planet, shining on a lost city. The dwellers there must have seen the catastrophe which blasted that sister planet from the face of the sky. And if the little man were right, the gods of that Lost Planet had been saved from the wreckage and spirited across the void to a dwelling-place in this greatly honored city of the mountains that is not even a memory today.
And time passed, so the story went. The city agedЧthe gods agedЧthe planet aged. At last, in some terrible catas-. trophe, the planet heaved under the cityТs foundations, the mountaihs shook it into ruins and folded themselves into new and dreadful shapes. The seas receded, the fertile soil sluffed away from the rocks and time swallowed up the very memory of that city which once had been the dwelling-place of godsЧwhich was still, so the hoarse whisper had told them, the dwelling-place of gods.
УMust have been right around here somewhere,Ф said Smith, Уthat those two found the cave.Ф
УOut around the slope to the left,Ф agreed Yarol. УLetТs go,Ф He squinted up at the feeble sun. УNot very long past dawn. We ought to be back again by dark if things go right.Ф
They left the ship in its shelter and struck out across the salt drylands, the harsh scrub brushing about their knees and their breath clouding the thin air as. they advanced. The slope
curved away to the left, rising in rapid ascent to black peaks that wete unscalable and forbidding. The only hope of pene.trating that wall lay in-finding the cavern that their predecessors had fled. .. . and in that cavernЧSmith loosened the heat-gun in its holster at his~side.
They had plodded for fifteen minutes through the scrub, dry snow rising under their feet and the harsh salt air frosting their breath, before the mouth of the cave they were hunting appeared darkly under the overhanging rock they had been told of.
The two peered in doubtfully. That jagged floor might never have known the tread of human feet, so far as one might know by the look of it. Powdered snow lay undisturbed in the deep crannies, and daylight did nOt penetrate very far into the forbidding dark beyond.Т Smith drew his gun, took a deep breath and plunged into the blackness and the cold, with Yarol at his heels.
It was like leaving everything human and alive for some frosty limbo that had never known life. The cold struck sharply through their leather garments. They took out their Tomlinson tubes before they had gone more than twenty paces, and the twin bearn~ illumined a scene of utter desola-. lion, more dead than death, for it seemed -never to have
known life. -
For perhaps fifteen minutes they stumbled through the cold dark. Smith kept his beam focused on the floor beneath them; YarolТs roved the walls and pierced the blackness ahead. Rough walls and ragged ceiling and teeth of broken stone projecting from the floor to slash at their bootsЧno sound but their footsteps, nothing but the dark and the frost and the silence. Then Yarol said, УItТs foggy in here,Ф and something clouded the clear beams of the lights fOr an instant; then~ darkness folded round them as suddenly and completely as the folds of a cloak.
Smith stopped dead-still, tense and listening. No sound. He felt the lens of his light-tube and knew that it still burnedЧit was warm, and the faint vibration under the glass
told him that the tubes still functione~l. But somethiё~ intangible and strange blotted it out at the source. . . a thick, stifling blackness that seemed to muffle their senses. It was like a bandage over the eyesЧSmith, holding the burning lightiens to his eyes, could flot detect even its outline in that ali-cloaking dark.
For perhaps five minutes that dead blackness held them. Vaguely they knew what to expect, but when it came, the shock of it took their breath away. There was no sound, but quite suddenly around a bend of the cavern came a figure of utter whiteness, seen at first fragmentarily through a screen of rock-toothed jags, then floating full into view against the bao~cground of the dark. Smith thought he had never seen whil~ness before until his incr~dulous eyes beheld this creatureЧif creature it could be. Somehow he thought it must be partly below the level of the floor along which it moved; for though in that blind black he had no way of gauging elevation, it seemed to hfln that the apparition, moving with an effortless glide, advanced unopposed through the sglid rock of the floor. And it was whiter than anything living or dead had ever been before.Чso white that it sickened him, sofliehow, and the flesh crept along his spine. Like a cut-out figure of paper, it blazed against the flat black beyond. The dark did not affect it, no shadows lay upon its surface; in two arbitrary dimensions only, blind white superimposed upon blind dark, it floated toward them. And it was tall, and somehow man-formed, but of no shape that
words could describe. -
SmithТlieard Yarol catch his breath in a gasp behind him. He heard no other sound, though the whiteness floated swiftly forward through the rocky floor. He was sure of that nowЧa part of it extended farther down than his feet, and they were planted upon solid rock. And though his skin crawled with unreasoning terror, and the hair on his neck prickled with the weird, impossible approach of the impossible thing, he kept his head enough to see that it was apparently solid, yet somehow milkijy translucent that it had
form and depth, though no shadows of that darkness lay upon
it; that from where no face should have been a blind, eyeless
visage fronted him impassively. It was very close now, and though the extremities of it trailed below the floor line, its height lifted far above his head. -
And a nameless, blind foree beat out from it and assailed him, a force that somehow seemed to be driving him into unnamable thingsЧan urge to madness, beating at his brain
with the reasonless buffeting of insanity, but a wilder, more incomprehensible insanity than the sane mind could understand.
Something frantic within him clamored for nstant, headlong flightЧhe heard Yarol Сs breathing panicky behind him and knew that he too wavered on the verge of boltingЧbut something insistent at the roots of his brain held him firm before the whiteness bearing down in its aura of madnessЧ something that denied the peril, that hinted at solution..
Scarcely realizing that he had moved, he found the heatgun in ~№s hand, and on a sudden impulse jerked his. arm up and sent a long, blue-hot streamer of flame straight at the advancing apparition. For the briefest of instants tfe blue dazzle flashed a light-blade through the dark. It struck the floating whiteness fullЧvanishedЧЧSmith heard a faint crackle of sparks on the invisible floor beyond and knew that it had passed through the creature without meeting resistance. And in that flashing second *hile the blue gaze split the thickness of the dark be saw it shine luridly upon a splinter of rock in its path, but not upon the white figure. No blaze of blueness affected the deathly pallor of itЧhe had a sudden conviction that though a galaxy of colored lights were played upon it no faintest hint of color could ever tinge it with any of manТs hues. Fighting the waves of madness that buffeted at~his brain, he realized painfully that it must be beyond the reach of menЧand thereforeЧ He laughed unsteadily and holstered his gun.
УCome on,Ф he yelled to Yarol, reaching out blindly to grasp his comradeТs arm, andЧsuppressing a tingle of
terrorЧplunged straight through that towering horror.
There was an instant of blaze and blindii~g whiteness, a moment of turmoil while dizziness swirled round him and the floor rocked under his feet and a maelstrom of mad impulses battered through his brain; then everything was black again and he was plunging recklessly ahead through the dark, dragging a limply acquiescent Yarol behind him.
After a while of stumbling progress, punctuated with falls, while the white horror dropped away behind them, not following, though the muffling dark still sealed their eyesЧthe almost forgotten light in SmithТs hand suddenly blazed forth again. In its light he faced Yarol, blinking at the abrupt illumination. The VenusianТs face was a mask of question, his black eyes bright with inquiry.
УWhat happened? What was it? How did youЧhow could weЧФ
УItcanТthavebeenreal,Ф said Smith with ashaky grin. УI mean, not material in the sense that we know. Looked awful enough, butЧwell, there were too many things about it that didnТt hitch up. Notice how it seemed ~ trail through the solid floor? And neither light nor dark affected itЧit had no shadows, even in that blackness, and the flash of my gun didnТt even give i~ a blue tinge. Then I remembered what that little fellow had told us about his three gods: that, though they had real existence, it was on such a widely different plane from ours that they couldnТt touch us except by providing themselves with a material body. I think his thing was like that also: visible, but too otlWr-dimensional .to reach us except through sight. And when! saw that the floor didnТt offer any resistance to it I thought that maybe, conversely, it wouldnТt affect us either. And it didnТt. WeТre through.Ф
Yarol drew a deep breath.
УThe master-mind,Ф he gibed affectionately. УWonder if anyone else ever figured that out, or are we the first to get through?Ф .
УDonТt know. DonТt get the idea it was just a scarecrow, though. I think we moved none too soon. A minute or two
longer andЧandЧI felt as if someone were stirring my brains with a stick. Nothing seemedЧright. I think I know now what was wrong with those other twoЧthey waited too.
long before they ran. Good thing we moved when we did.Ф
УBut what about that darkness?Ф