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

Lake Managua a dozen miles or so from the Pacific. It was simply a matter of choice, and Ted Welling,
of the Topographical Service of the Geological Survey, was doing his part to aid the choice.
At precisely 10:40 it happened. Ted was gazing idly through a faintly misty morning toward Ometepec,
its cone of a peak plumed by dusky smoke. A hundred miles away, across both Lake Nicaragua and
Lake Managua, the fiery mountain was easily visible from his altitude. All week, he knew, it had been
rumbling and smoking, but now, as he watched it, it burst like a mighty Roman candle.

There was a flash of white fire not less brilliant than the sun. There was a column of smoke with a red
core that spouted upward like a fountain and then mushroomed out. There was a moment of utter silence
in which the camera clicked methodically, and then there was a roar as if the very roof of Hell had blown
away to let out the bellows of the damned!

Ted had one amazed thoughtтАФthe sound had followed too quickly on the eruption! It should have taken
minutes to reach him at that distanceтАФand then his thoughts were forcibly diverted as the Colquist tossed
and skittered like a leaf in a hurricane. He caught an astonished glimpse of the terrain below, of Lake
Nicaragua heaving and boiling as if it were the seas that lash through the Straits of Magellan instead of a
body of landlocked fresh water. On the shore to the east a colossal wave was breaking, and there in a
banana grove frightened figures were scampering away. And then, exactly as if by magic, a white mist
condensed about him, shutting out all view of the world below.

He fought grimly for altitude. He had had three thousand feet, but now, tossed in this wild ocean of fog,
of up-drafts and down-drafts, of pockets and humps, he had no idea at all of his position. His altimeter
needle quivered and jumped in the changing pressure, his compass spun, and he had not the vaguest
conception of the direction of the ground. So he struggled as best he could, listening anxiously to the
changing whine of his blades as strain grew and lessened. And below, deep as thunder, came intermittent
rumblings that were, unless he imagined it, accompanied by the flash of jagged fires.

Suddenly he was out of it. He burst abruptly into clear air, and for a horrible instant it seemed to him that
he was actually flying inverted. Apparently below him was the white sea of mist, and above was what
looked at first glance like dark ground, but a moment's scrutiny revealed it as a world-blanketing canopy
of smoke or dust, through which the sun shone with a fantastic blue light. He had heard of blue suns, he
recalled; they were one of the rarer phenomena of volcanic eruptions.

His altimeter showed ten thousand. The vast plain of mist heaved in gigantic ridges like rolling waves, and
he fought upward away from it. At twenty thousand the air was steadier, but still infinitely above was the
sullen ceiling of smoke. Ted leveled out, turning at random north-east, and relaxed.

"Whew!" he breathed. "WhatтАФwhat happened?"

He couldn't land, of course, in that impenetrable fog. He flew doggedly north and cast, because there
was an airport at Bluefields, if this heaving sea of white didn't blanket it.

But it did. He had still half a tank of fuel, and, he bored grimly north. Far away was a pillar of fire, and
beyond it to the right, another and a third. The first, of course, was Ometepec, but what were the others?
Fuego and Tajumulco? It seemed impossible.

Three hours later the fog was still below him, and the grim roof of smoke was dropping as if to crush him
between. He was going to have to land soon; even now he must have spanned Nicaragua and be
somewhere over Honduras. With a sort of desperate calm he slanted down toward the fog and plunged
in. He expected to crash; curiously, the only thing he really regretted was dying without a chance to say