"Jack Williamson - Through the Purple Cloud Part" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

night, thought George.

THEY had been up a little less than an hour when the astounding catastrophe took place.
The little, spectacled man who said his name was Cann had persisted in his high-voiced questions.
George had pointed out to him the San Fernando and Santa Clara valleys, and Tejon Pass, and Lebec.
They were just coming across the last gray mountain range, over the southern tip of the great San Joaquin
Valley.
The air had been smooth, though the ship seemed to rise and fall with a slow, almost regular motion.
The girl had seemed to be enjoying her flight immensely, peering out of the windows with a lively interest.
Once or twice, to George's pleasure, she had leaned over to watch when he was pointing out something
of interest on Cann's map.
Once she had asked some little question. Her voice, above the mighty, overwhelming roar of the four
great motors, had seemed clear and pleasant. George began to regret that the flight and their
companionship must end in a few short hours when the great plane glided down to the Alameda airport,
across the bay from San Francisco.
But the plane, and most of her passengers, never reached Alameda.
George happened to be peering out when it occurred, trying to locate for Cann the town of
Maricopa, which lay a little to the left, and ahead of the plane.
The air before the ship was suddenly filled with a blinding purple light, as though a great shell had
burst, releasing a vast volume of incandescent violet vapor. A moment before, the sky had been clear.
The purple cloud appeared suddenly, as if from thin air.
Its diameter must have been many miles, extending from the ground into the cloudless sky above
them. The great plane was plunging almost at the center of it, and far too close for the pilot to turn aside.
George thinks, however, that the ship was suddenly tilted up, at the last instant, as if the pilot had
attempted to zoom above the purple cloud. But it was only a moment after the cloud appeared that they
struck it; the tragedy was occasioned by chance, not by any want of skill тАФ and no display of skill could
have averted it.
But as they pierced through it, George saw the purple cloud contract swiftly. It became a great,
smooth-surfaced sphere of violet-reds radiance. Then, somehow, it seemed to flatten, become thinner,
until it was only a disk of red-blue light.
It became a circle of purple flame, a hundred yards and more in diameter тАФwe can judge its size
only from George Cleland's guess based on that quick glimpse of the amazing thing. A disk of
amethystine fire, hanging in the air, with the great plane plunging away from its center.
A long, dreadful instant went by, after George knew that they had crashed through it. He had time to
wonder what it was, to wonder if it could be only some trouble with his eyes, then he realized that others
could see it for Cann shrank back from the window and clutched at his arm.
Without a sound or a vibration, they had passed through the purple disk, into a flood of crimson
light!



George was dazed.
One instant, the blue sky was above and the green-blue fields beneath. The next, they were flying at
some crazy angle beneath a sky that was red, plunging toward the foot of a precipitous cliff of jet-black
rock.
The cloud of purple had been like a gate to another world. They had flashed through it, into another
plane. of existence that seemed to lie co-existent with ours, yet more distant than the Andromeda nebula.
To the science of a few decades ago, such a thing would have been incredible. But Einstein's relativity,
with its four-dimensional continuum, with its destruction of the old conception of space as an absolute
dimension brings it much nearer to understandable phenomena. And it is confidently trusted that the