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

"Tonight?" he asked hopefully.
She shook her head. "Sorry. I have to dine with some family friends."
"Tomorrow night, then?"
"I shouldn't. IтАФ"
"But you will," he stated positively. "Heaven knows if I'll be stationed here long, and I don't want to
waste a mo-ment."
"Why?" she asked sharply. "Do you expect to be transferred?"
He bit his tongue. "No, butтАФ"
Needed distraction came. He whirled and saluted a dark, sinister-looking army officer descending
the steps of the build-ing.
"Sally, here's Captain Cass at last. I thought he'd be in today! Sir, this is the Sally Amber you've
heard me talking about so much."
Jim Cass took the hand Sally ex-tended. "No wonder Dick's been rav-ing," he said, staring at her
appraisingly with his cold, blue eyes. "I apologize for thinking he was nuts. I didn't be-lieve he had the
good tasteтАФ"
His stare changed to a puzzled frown. "Say, haven't we met before?"
"If we had," said Sally, "I wouldn't have forgotten it."
But Captain Cass stood staring, long after her copter was indistinguishable among the cross currents
of traffic.

CASS was no closer to the solution when he dropped in on Lister the fol-lowing day. The biologist,
in labora-tory smock, was busy with the war-time routine of checking water samples from half a dozen
coastal cities, and had but little time to listen to his superior.
"Oakland," he muttered, "bacterial count seven per c. c.; that's normal. Monterey, eleven; that's safe.
Vera CruzтАФsay, did you ever see so much algae in the drinking water? Look at that beaker on the
window sill. That's after two hours' exposure to sunlight, and it's as green as pea soup already. What's
more, I saw reports from Chi-cago that it's just the same there. And тАФthis is queerтАФfrom London as
well."
"What's that fuzz on the trees?" asked Cass thoughtfully, looking idly out of the window. "I never saw
that here before."
"Yeah. I noticed that. It's just a tree lichen, something like Spanish moss. A cryptogamous
plantтАФthat is, a spore-breeder. It's related toтАФтАФ By the Lord! It's confervae, too, just like the alga!"
"Well? So what?"
"So nothing, except that whatever has stimulated the algae in the sea and in the drinking water, has
also stimu-lated the lichens and the fungi. The cryptogamoids are the sort of plants that grew on earth
during the carbonif-erous age, the age of coal."
"Maybe we're in for another age of coal, huh?"
"Hardly." said Lister, laughing. "There are several theories as to what caused the carboniferous age,
such as a higher concentration of carbon di-oxide in the air, or a world-wide tropi-cal climate, or intense
sun-spot activity, which would induce frequent and vio-lent electrical storms on the earth, and hence
produce an abnormal amount of ozone in the air. Ozone is a particularly dense form of oxygen, and is
able to filter out the death raysтАФ"
"Death rays?" exclaimed Cass, prick-ing up his ears. He had been paying very little attention to
Lister, but here was something in his own lineтАФsome-thing the military intelligence ought to know about.
"Death rays?"
Lister laughed again. "Not the kind of death rays the army is interested in," he said. "But there are
certain invisi-ble rays of sunlight which have a fatal effect on living creatures. Ozone filters them out.
"It's one of the remarkable instances of the balance of nature that there is normally just enough ozone
in the outer layers of the atmosphere to keep out the quantity of that invisible light which would be fatal to
human life, and yet let in just enough to keep the algae within reasonable bounds. Now ifтАФ Say! I