"Bradbury, Ray - Foghorn, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

Ray Bradbury: The Foghorn

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OUT there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the
coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit
the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the grey
sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red
again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then
there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering
through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered
cards and make the waves turn high and foam.

"It's a lonely life, but you're used to it now, aren't you?" asked McDunn.

"Yes," I said. "You're a good talker, thank the Lord."

"Well, it's your turn on land tomorrow," he said, smiling, "to dance the
ladies and drink gin."

"What do you think McDunn, when I leave you out here alone?"

"On the mysteries of the sea." McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past
seven of a cold November evening, the heat on, the light switching its tail
in two hundred directions, the Fog Horn bumbling in the high throat of the
tower. There wasn't a town for a hundred miles down the coast, just a road,
which came lonely through dead country to the sea, with few cars on it, a
stretch of two miles of cold water out to our rock, and rare few ships.

"The mysteries of the sea," said McDunn thoughtfully. "You know, the
ocean’s the biggest damned snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a thousand
shapes and colours, no two alike. Strange. One night, years ago, I was here
alone, when all of the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made
them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of trembling and staring up at the
tower light going red, white, red, white across them so I could see their
funny eyes. I turned cold. They were like a big peacock's tail, moving out
there until midnight. Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped away,
the million of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in some sort of way,
they came all those miles to worship. Strange. But think how the tower must
look to them, standing seventy feet above the water, the God-light flashing
out from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monster voice. They
never came back, those fish, but don't you think for a while they thought
they were in the Presence?"

I shivered. I looked out at the long grey lawn of the sea stretching away
into nothing and nowhere.

"Oh, the sea's full." McDunn puffed his pipe nervously, blinking. He had
been nervous all day and hadn't said why. "For all our engines and so
called submarines, it'll be ten thousand centuries before we set foot on