"John Norman - Gor 01- Tarnsman of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

The next thing I was running like a demented animal, in any direction, every direction. How long I
ran I don't know. It may have been hours, perhaps only a few minutes. I slipped and fell dozens of
times and ran into the prickly branches of the pines, the needles stabbing at my face. I may have
been sobbing; I remember the taste of salt in my mouth. But mostly I remember a blind, headlong
flight, a panic-stricken, unworthy, sickening flight. Once I saw two eyes in the darkness and
screamed and ran from them, hearing the flap of wings behind me and the startled cry of an owl.
Once I startled a small band of deer and found myself in the midst of their bounding shapes
buffeting me in the darkness.

The moon came out, and the mountainside was suddenly lit with its cold beauty, white on the snow
in the trees and on the side of the slope, sparkling on the rocks. I could run no further. I fell
to the ground, gasping for breath, suddenly asking myself why I had run. For the first time in my
life I had felt full, unreasoning fear, and it had gripped me like the paws of some grotesque
predatory animal. I had surrendered to it for just a moment, and it had become a force that had
carried me, hurling me about as if I were a swimmer captured in surging waves-a force that could
not be resisted. It had departed now. I must never surrender to it again. I looked around and
recognized the platform of rock near which I had set my bedroll. I saw the ashes of my fire. I had
returned to my camp. Somehow I'd known that I would.

As I lay there in the moonlight, I felt the earth beneath me, against my aching muscles and the
body that was covered with the foul-smelling sheen of fear and sweat. I felt then that it was good
even to feel pain. Feeling was the important thing. I was alive.

I saw the ship descend. For a moment it looked like a falling star, but then it suddenly became
clear and substantial, like a broad, thick disk of silver. It was silent and settled on the rock
platform, scarcely disturbing the light snow that was scattered on it. There was a slight wind in
the pine needles, and I rose to my feet. As I did so, a door in the side of the ship slid quietly
upward. I must go in. My father's words recurred in my memory: "The fate is upon you." Before
entering the ship, I stopped at the side of the large, flat rock on which it rested. I bent down
and scooped up, as my father had asked, a handful of our green earth. I, too, felt that it was
important to take something with me, something which, in a way, was my native soil. The soil of my
planet, my world.



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2

The Counter-Earth

I REMEMBERED NOTHING, FROM THE time I'd boarded the silver disk in the mountains of New Hampshire
until now. I awoke, feeling rested, and opened my eyes, half expecting to see my room in the
alumni house at the college. I turned my head, without pain or discomfort. I seemed to be lying on
some hard, flat object, perhaps a table, in a circular room with a low ceiling some seven feet
high. There were five narrow windows, not large enough to let a man through; they rather reminded
me of ports for bowmen in a castle tower, yet they admitted sufficient light to allow me to
recognize my surroundings.
the earth, was blue. My first thought was that this must be the earth and the sun's apparent size