"Tom Reamy - San Diego Lightfoot Sue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reamy Tom)

one made an entirely different and braver choice t&an one actually dM, or iu wlu'ufi tide whole world
made such a decision, with a completely different future resulting. Golden glowing might-have-beens nag
increasingly at the minds of some older people.

In line with this interpretation I must admit that my whole unsettling experience was structured very much
like a dream. It began with startling flashes of a changed world. It continued into a longer period when I
completelyN accepted the changed world and
LEEBEH

delighted in it and, despite fleeting quivers of uneasiness, wished I could bask in its glow forever. And it
ended in horrors, or nightmares, which I hate to mention, let alone discuss, until I must.

Opposing this dream notion, there are times when I am completely convinced that what happened to me
in Manhattan and in a certain famous building there was no dream at all, but absolutely real, and that I did
indeed visit another Time Stream.

Finally, I must point out that what I am about to tell you I am necessarily describing in retrospect, highly
aware of several transitions involved and, whether I want to or not, commenting on them and making
deductions that never once occurred to me at the time.

No, at the time it happened to meтАФand now at this moment of writing I am convinced that it did happen
and was absolutely realтАФone instant simply succeeded another in the most natural way possible. I
questioned nothing.

As to why it all happened to me, and what particular mechanism was involved, well, I am convinced that
every man or woman has rare, brief moments of extreme sensitivity, or rather vuiaerability, when his mind
and entire being may be blown by the Change Winds to Somewhere Else. And then, by what I call the
Law of the Conservation of Reality, /
I was walking down Broadway somewhere near 34th Street. It was a chilly day, sunny despite the
smogтАФa bracing dayтАФand I suddenly began to stride along more briskly than is my cautious habit,
throwing my feet ahead of me with a faint suggestion of the goose step. I also threw back my shoulders
and took deep breaths, ignoring the fumes which tickled my nostrils. Beside me, traffic growled and
snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that
desperate ratiike
CATCH THAT ZEPPELIN!

9

urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York. I cheerfully
ignored that too. I even smiled at the sight of a ragged bum and a fur-coated gray-haired society lady
both independently dodging across the street through the hurtling traffic with a cool practiced skill one
sees only in America's biggest metropolis.

Just then I noticed a dark, wide shadow athwart the street ahead of me. It could not be that of a cloud,
for it didnot move. I craned my neck sharply and looked straight up like the veriest yokel, a regular
Hans-Kopf-wrdie-Luft (Hans-Head-in-the-Air, a German figure of comedy).

My gaze had to climb up the giddy 102 stories of the tallest building in the world, the Empire State. My
gaze was strangely accompanied by the vision of a gigantic, long-fanged ape making the same ascent with

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