"Stanley G. Weinbaum - Shifting Seas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

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Title: Shifting Seas
Author: Stanley G. Weinbaum
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0607511h.html
Language: English
Date first posted: September 2006
Date most recently updated: September 2006

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Shifting Seas
by

Stanley G. Weinbaum

It developed later that Ted Welling was one of the very few eye-witnesses of the catastrophe, or rather,
that among the million and a half eye-witnesses, he was among the half dozen that survived. At the time,
he was completely unaware of the extent of the disaster, although it looked bad enough to him in all truth!

He was in a Colquist gyro, just north of the spot where Lake Nicaragua drains its brown overflow into
the San Juan, and was bound for Managua, seventy-five miles north and west across the great inland sea.
Below him, quite audible above the muffled whir of his motor, sounded the intermittent clicking of his
tripanoramic camera, adjusted delicately to his speed so that its pictures could be assembled into a
beautiful relief map of the terrain over which he passed. That, in fact, was the sole purpose of his flight; he
had left San Juan del Norte early that morning to traverse the route of the proposed Nicaragua Canal,
flying for the Topographical branch of the U. S. Geological Survey. The United States, of course, had
owned the rights to the route since early in the centuryтАФa safeguard against any other nation's aspirations
to construct a competitor for the Panama Canal.

Now, however, the Nicaragua Canal was actually under consideration. The over-burdened ditch that
crossed the Isthmus was groaning under vastly increased traffic, and it became a question of either cutting
the vast trench another eighty-five feet to sea-level or opening an alternate passage. The Nicaragua route
was feasible enough; there was the San Juan emptying from the great lake into the Atlantic, and there was