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

"That question in truth must be read by the future generations as a cry at once
of ecstasy and despair. Ecstasy because even while the heavens fell upon them,
my companions remained firm and courageousтАФbecause in the face of
earthquakes, tornadoes, bloody battles and the unimaginable holocaust of
Destruction Day itself, they not only preserved whatever claims the race of man
may have to majesty, but by their ingenuity they escaped from the earth to this
new planet, which has invaded and attached itself to our solar system.
"And I am in despair not only because, so far as we can tell, all but one
hundred and three members of the human race have perished, not only
because my friends, my home, the cities that were familiar to me, the trees and
flowers I knew, the rivers and the oceans, the scent of the wind and the
accustomed aspects of the sky have forevermore disappeared from the universe,
and not only because I am incapable of setting down the emotions to which

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those cosmic calamities give rise, but for another reason: as vast, as stirring, as
overwhelming to the mind as those foregoing, the responsibility for half a billion
years of evolution which terminated in man rests upon myself and one hundred
and two others.
"They stand there in the sunshine under the strange sky on our brown earthтАФ
forty-three men, fifty-seven women, two children. They have been singingтАФa
medley of songs which under other circumstances might seem irrelevant. Many
of them are foreigners and do not know the words, but they also singтАФwith
tears streaming down their faces and a catch in their voices. They sang тАШThe
Processional' and they sang 'Nearer, My God, to Thee.' After that they sang
'Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here.' Then they sang 'The Marseillaise' with
Duquesne leadingтАФleading and bellowing the words, and weeping.
"What a spectacle! Beside it, the picture of Leif Ericsson or Columbus reaching
green shores at last is dimmed to insignificance. For those ancient explorers
found the path to a mere continent, while this band has blazed a trail of fire
through space to a new planet.
"Cole Hendron is there, his magnificent head thrown back, and his face grave
under its thatch of newly whitened hair. No doubt replicas of Hendron's head
will be handed down through the ages, if ages are to follow us. His daughter
Eve has been near him, and near to Tony Drake. In young Drake one sees the
essence of the change which has taken place in all the members of our
company. The fashionable, gay-hearted New Yorker is greatly changed. So
many times in the past two years has he resigned himself to death, and so
many times has he escaped from it only through courage, audacity and good
fortune, that he seems superior to death. His face is no longer precisely young,
and it contains, side by side, elements of the stoniest inflexibility and the most
willing unselfishness. I have no doubt that if this colony survives, when the
time comes to bury our leader and our hero,тАФthe incomparable Cole Hendron,
тАФit will be Drake who supersedes him in command. For by that day I am sure
the great person in that young man will have availed itself of all our technical
knowledge as a mere corollary of his remarkable character.
"And now,"тАФthe pen wavered,тАФ"to what I imagine whimsically as the new