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

The several doors opening into the hall were closed. The one at the back, he knew, gave admittance
to the laboratory. Impelled by some vague premonition, he hastened toward it down the long hall and
threw it open.
As he stepped inside the room, his foot slipped on a spot of something red. Recovering his balance
with difficulty, he peered about.
Bending down, Larry briefly examined the red spot on which he had slipped. It was a pool of fresh
blood which had not yet darkened. Lying beside it, crimson-splashed, was a revolver. As he picked up
the weapon, he cried out in astonishment.
Something had happened to the gun. The trigger guard was torn from it, and the cylinder crushed as if
in some resistless grasp; the stock was twisted, and the barrel bent almost into a circle. The revolver had
been crumpled by some terrific forceтАФas a soft clay model of it might have been broken by the pressure
of a man's hand.
"Crimson shades of Caesar!" he muttered, and dropped the crushed weapon to the floor again.
His eyes swept the silent laboratory.
It was a huge room, taking up all the rear part of the house, from the first floor to the roof. Gray
daylight streamed through a skylight, twenty feet overhead. The ends of the vast room were cluttered
with electrical and chemical apparatus; but Larry's eye was caught at once by a strange and complex
device, which loomed across from him, in the center of the floor.

TWO pillars of intense light, a ray of crimson flame and another of deeply violet radiance, beat
straight down from a complicated array of enormous, oddly shaped electron tubes, of mirrors and lenses
and prisms, of coils and whirling disks, which reached almost to the roof. Upright, a yard in diameter and
almost a yard apart, the strange columns of light were sharp-edged as two transparent cylinders filled
with liquid light of ruby and of amethyst. Each ray poured down upon a circular platform of glass or
polished crystal.
Hanging between those motionless cylinders of red and violet light was a strange-looking, greenish
globe. A round ball, nearly a yard in diameter, hung between the rays, almost touching them. Its surface
was oddly splotched with darker and lighter areas. It was spinning steadily, at a low rate of speed. Larry
did not see what held it up; it seemed hanging free, several feet above the crystal platforms.
Reluctantly he withdrew his eyes from the mysterious sphere and looked about the room once more.
No, the laboratory was vacant of human occupants. No one was hidden among the benches that were
cluttered with beakers and test tubes and stills, or among the dynamos and transformers in the other end
of the room.
A confusion of questions beat through Larry's brain.
What danger could be haunting this quiet laboratory? Was this the blood of Agnes Sterling or the
scientist who employed her that was now clotting on the floor? What terrific force had crumpled up the
revolver? What had become of Agnes and Dr. Whiting? And of whatever had attacked them? Had
Agnes called him after the attack, or before?

DESPITE himself, his attention was drawn back to the little globe spinning so regularly, floating in the
air between the pillars of red and violet flame. Floating alone, like a little world in space, without a visible
support, it might be held up by magnetic attraction, he thought.
A tiny planet!
His mind quickened at the idea, and he half forgot the weird mystery gathering about him. He
stepped nearer the sphere. It was curiously like a miniature world. The irregular bluish areas would be
seas; the green and the brown spaces land. In some parts, the surface appeared mistily
obscuredтАФperhaps, by masses of cloud.
Larry saw an odd-looking lamp, set perhaps ten feet behind the slowly spinning, floating ball,
throwing upon it a bright ray of vividly blue light. Half the strange sphere was brilliantly illuminated by it;
the rest was in comparative darkness. That blue lamp, it came to Larry, lit the sphere as the sun lights the