"Bradbury, Ray - The Foghorn (ss) v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

head rose a full forty feet above the water on a slender and beautiful dark
neck. Only then did the body, like a little island of black coral and shells and
crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all,
from head to tip of tail, I estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet.
I don't know what I said. I said something.
"Steady, boy, steady," whispered McDunn.
"It's impossible!" I said.
"No, Johnny, we're impossible. It's like it always was ten million years ago. It
hasn't changed. It's us and the land that've changed, become impossible. Us!"
It swam slowly and with a great dark majesty out in the icy waters, far away.
The fog came and went about it, momentarily erasing its shape. One of the
monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our immense light, red, white,
red, white, like a disc held high and sending a message in primaeval code. It
was as silent as the fog through which it swam.
"It's a dinosaur of some sort--" I crouched down, holding to the stair rail.
"Yes, one of the tribe."
"But they died out!"
"No, only hid away in the Deeps. Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn't
that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps. There's all
the coldness and darkness and deepness in the world in a word like that."
"What'll we do?"
"Do? We got our job, we can't leave. Besides, we're safer here than in any boat
trying to get to land. That thing's as big as a destroyer and almost as swift."
"But here, why does it come here?"
The next moment I had my answer.
The Fog Horn blew.
And the monster answered.
A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and
alone that it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the
tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The
monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the
sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of
isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.
"Now," whispered McDunn, "do you know why it comes here?"
I nodded.
"All year long, Johnny, that poor monster there lying far out, a thousand miles
at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe, biding its time, perhaps it’s a million
years old, this one creature. Think of it, waiting a million years; could you
wait that long? Maybe it's the last of its kind. I sort of think that's true.
Anyway, here come men on land and build this lighthouse, five years ago. And set
up their Fog Horn and sound it and sound it out towards the place where you bury
yourself in sleep and sea memories of a world where there were thousands like
yourself, but now you're alone, all alone in a world not made for you, a world
where you have to hide."
"But the sound of the Fog Horn comes and goes, comes and goes, and you stir from
the muddy bottom of the Deeps, and your eyes open like the lenses of two-foot
cameras and you move, slow, slow, for you have the ocean sea on your shoulders,
heavy. But that Fog Horn comes through a thousand miles of water, faint and
familiar, and the furnace in your belly stokes up, and you begin to rise, slow,
slow. You feed yourself on great slakes of cod and minnow, on rivers of