"Philip Wylie & Edwin Balmer - After Worlds Collide" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wylie Philip)

Bronson Beta swung into a course about our sun.
Upon it, Hendron brought down the "Ark." With him was a company of a
hundred and three human beings. Tony Drake was one of them, and his
Japanese servant, Kyto. Eliot James, the diarist and historian of the party was
in the "Ark." So was Dodson, the surgeon, and Duquesne, the French physicist
who had been saved at the eleventh hour as the Ark stood ready to rise from
Holocaust.
A safe landing was made. The air of Bronson Beta was found to be breathable.
But there was no word of the second shipтАФthe vessel under Ransdell's
command which had left with them. It was given up for lost Ransdell, who also
loved Eve, was presumed to have died somewhere in space with his brave
companionsтАФ Jack Taylor, the college boy who had become one of Tony's best
friends, and Peter Vanderbilt, the cynical and fearless New Yorker, and Greve
and Smith, and four hundred others.
The arrivals on Bronson Beta could rouse no answer to their radio signals.
They were forced into the awful realization that of all humanity they alone
survived. They were alone on an unknown world where a nameless and dead
race had once built citiesтАФon a world which had been drifting through the
absolute zero of space for nameless millenia. They faced the problem of
survival. Responsibility for the future of the species was theirs.
Resolutely, they turned to their prodigious task.


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CHAPTER I THE FIRST DAY ON THE NEW PLANET
Eliot James sat at a metal desk inside the space ship which had conveyed a few
score human beings from the doomed earth to safety on the sun's new planet
Bronson Beta. In front of Eliot James was his already immemorial diary, and
over it he poised a fountain pen.
He had written several paragraphs:
"AprilтАФwhat shall I call it? Is it the 2nd day of April, or is it the first? Have we,
the last survivors of the earth, landed upon our new planet on All Fools Day?
That would be ironic, and yet trivial in the face of all that has happened. But as
I meditate on the date, I am in doubt about how to express time in my diary.
"The earth is goneтАФsmashed to fragments; and the companion of its destroying
angel, upon which our band of one hundred and three Argonauts holds so brief
and hazardous a residence, is still without names, seasons and months. But
April has vanished with the earth; and for all I know, spring, winter, summer
and fall may also be absent in the new world.
"I have pledged myself to write in this diary every day, as Hendron assures me
there will be no other record of our adventures here until we have become well
enough established to permit the compilation of a formal history. And yet it is
with the most profound difficulty that I compel myself to set down words on
this, man's first morning in his new home.
"What shall I say?