"Jack Williamson - After World's End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

coroner's estimate, about twenty hours when we found his body.

It is fortunate indeed for us, by the way, that we had been together at the lakes and that friends there were able to
substantiate our mutual alibi. Otherwise, in view of the incredible circumstances, ugly suspicion must have fallen upon
us.

105
106 After World's End
"Death," ran the oddly phrased verdict of the coroner's jury, after we all had been questioned, and the premises, the
manuscript, and the stone examined, "resulting from injuries sustained through the act of persons or things
unknown."

The stranger's life, as much as his death, remains a mystery. The sheriff and the aiding state police have failed to
identify him. The manuscript is signed, "Barry Horn," but no record has been found that such a man is missing. The
medical examiners agreed that he was of contemporary American stock; but they were mystified by the freaks of cell
structure indicating extreme age in a man apparently young. -тАФ

His clothing, even, is enigma. Textile experts have failed to name the fine rayon-like fibers of his odd gray tunic and the
soiled, torn cloak we found on the couch. The hard shiny buttons and buckle, like the bright pliant stuff of his belt and
sandals, have baffled the synthetic chemists.

The weapon we found in the yellow belt seems worth the study of science, but no scientist yet has made anything of
it. It looks like a big, queer pistol, with a barrel of glass. Its mechanism is obviously broken, and any attempts to fire it
have proved unsuccessful.

How he came into the bungalowтАФunless in the strange way his manuscript suggestsтАФwe have been unable to
conjecture. For the house was securely locked before we started to the lakes, and no fastening seems to have been
disturbed. A tramp, so the baffled sheriff argues, might break undetected into an empty houseтАФbut, if anything seems
certain about Barry Horn, it is that he was not a common tramp.

The manuscript was written with my own pen, on paper he found in-the desk. The task must have taken him three or
four days. The doctors seem astonished that he was able to complete it. And it must have been a race with pain and
death, for the script is continually more hurried and uneven, until, toward the end, it is barely legible.

The used dishes and empty cans on the kitchen table show that he found several meals for himselfтАФthe last of which,
evidently, he was unable to eat, for the food was left untouched on the plate. A wrinkled rug lay with his cloak on the
couch, where he slept and rested.

foreword 107

He must have rummaged for something in the medicine cabinet, for we found that open^ and a bottle of
mercurochrome smashed on the bathroom floor. He seems to have made no effort, however, to get medical assistance.
For my telephone was sitting, dusty and untouched, on the desk where he wrote and died.

He surely perceived the end, for the page beneath his hand was the opening of a will. Had he lived to complete it, his
instructions might have cleared up much of the monstrous riddle. He had written:

To Whom It May Concern:

I, Barry Horn, being lately returned out of Space and Time to this my own beloved land and era, finding myself yet