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

future readers of my notes, I make an apology. This is our first day on Bronson
Beta. My impatience has exhausted my conscience. I must lay down my pen,
leave the remarkable ship wherein I write, and go but upon the face of this
earth untrod by man. I can restrain myself no longer."
Eliot James stepped to the gangplank that had been laid down from the Ark.
The earth around the huge metal cylinder had been melted by the blasts of its

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atomic propulsion-jets. But now it was cool again. A space of two or three
hundred yards lay between the Ark and the cliff which beetled over the
unknown sea. In that space were the planetary pilgrims. They had stopped
singing. Half of them stood on the top of the precipice regarding the waters that
rolled in from a nameless horizon. The others were distributed over the
landscape. With a smile James noted the botanist, Higgins, leaping from rock
to rock, his pockets and his hands full of specimens of ferns and mosses which
he had collected. Every few seconds his eye lighted upon a new species of
vegetation, and be knelt to gather it. But his greediness resulted invariably in
the spilling of specimens already collected, and the result was that he
continued hopping about, dropping things and picking them up, with all the
energy and disorganization of a distracted bird.
James walked down the gangplank and joined Tony, Eve and Cole Hendron.
The leader of the expedition nodded to the writer. "You certainly are a
persistant fellow, James. Some day I hope to find a situation so violent and
unique that it keeps you from working on your diary."
"We have been through a number of such situations," James answered.
"NeverthelessтАФ" Hendron said. He checked himself. Several of the people on the
edge of the cliff had turned toward the Ark and were marching toward him.
"Hendron!" they hailed him again. "Hendron! Cole Hendron!"
Their hysteria had not yet cleared away; they remained in the emotional
excitement of the earth-cataclysm they had escaped but witnessed, and of the
incomparable adventure of their flight.
"Hendron! Hendron! What do you want us now to do?" they demanded; for their
discipline, too, yet clung to themтАФ the stern, uncompromising discipline
demanded of them during the preparation of the Ship of Escape, the discipline
of the League of the Last Days.
Too, the amazements of this new place paralyzed them; and for that they were
not to be blamed. The wonder was that they had survived, as well, the
emotional shocks; so they surrounded again their leader, who throughout had
seen farther ahead and more clearly than them all; and who, through
Doomsday itself, had never failed them.
Hendron stepped upon an outcrop of stone, and smiled down at them. "I have
made too many speeches," he said. "And this morning is scarcely a suitable
hour for further thanksgiving. It may be proper and pleasant, later, to devote
such a day as the Pilgrims, from one side of our earth to another, did; but like


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