"Jack Williamson - The Pygmy Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

The Pygmy Planet
By Jack Williamson

Down into the infinitely small goes Larry on his mission to the Pygmy Planet.

тАЬNOTHING ever happens to me!" Larry Manahan grumbled under his breath, sitting behind his desk
at the advertising agency which employed his services in return for the consideration of fifty a week. "All
the adventure I know is what I see in the movies, or read about in magazines. What wouldn't I give for a
slice of real life!"
Unconsciously, he tensed the muscles of his six feet of lean, hard body. His crisp, flame-colored hair
seemed to bristle; his blue eyes blazed. He clenched a brown hammer of a fist.
Larry felt himself an energetic, red-blooded square peg, badly afflicted with the urge for adventure,
miserably wedged in a round hole. It is one of the misfortunes of our civilization that a young man who,
for example, might have been an excellent pirate a couple of centuries ago, must be kept chained to a
desk. And that seemed to be Larry's fate.
"Things happen to other people," he muttered. "Why couldn't an adventure come to me?"
He sat, staring wistfully at a picture of a majestic mountain, landscape, soon to be used in the
advertising of a railway company whose publicity was handled by his agency, when the jangle of the
telephone roused him with a start.
"Oh, LarryтАФ" came a breathless, quivering voice.
Then, with a click, the connection was broken.
The voice had been feminine and had carried a familiar ring. Larry tried to place it, as he listened at
the receiver and attempted to get the broken connection restored.
"Your party hung up, and won't answer," the operator informed him.
He replaced the receiver on the hook, still seeking to follow the thin thread of memory given him by
the familiar note in that eager excited voice. If only the girl had spoken a few more words!

THEN it came to him. "Agnes Sterling!" he exclaimed aloud.
Agnes Sterling was a slender, elfish, dark-haired girlтАФlovely, he had thought her, on the occasions of
their few brief meetings. Larry knew her as the secretary and laboratory assistant of Dr. Travis Whiting, a
retired college professor known for his work on the structure of the atom. Larry had called at the
home-laboratory of the savant, months before, to check certain statistics to be used for advertising
purposes and had met the girl there. Only a few times since had he seen her.
Now she had called him in a voice that fairly trembled with excitementтАФand, he thought, dread! And
she had been interrupted before she had time to give him any message.
For a few seconds Larry stared at the telephone. Then he rose abruptly to his feet, crammed his hat
on his head, and started for the door.
"The way to find adventure is to go after it," he murmured. "And this is the invitation!"
It was not many minutes later that he sprang out of a taxi at the front of the building in which Dr.
Travis Whiting made his home and maintained a private experimental laboratory. It was a two-story
stucco house, rather out of date, set well back from the sidewalk, with a scrap of lawn and a few
straggling shrubs before it. The door was closed, the windows curtained blankly. The place seemed
deserted and forbidding.
Larry ran up the uneven brick walk to the door and rang the bell. Impatiently, he waited a few
moments. No sound came from within. He felt something ominous, fateful, about the silent mystery that
seemed to shroud the old house. For the first time, it occurred to him that Agnes might be in physical
danger, as a result of some incautious experiment on the part of Dr. Whiting.
 INSTINCTIVELY, his hand sought the door knob. To his surprise, the door was unlocked. It
swung open before him. For a moment he stared, hesitating, into the dark hall revealed beyond. Then,
driven by the thought that Agnes might be in danger, he advanced impulsively.