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

jellyfish, and you rise slow through the autumn months, through September when
the fogs started, through October with more fog and the horn still calling you
on, and then, late in November, after pressurizing yourself day by day, a few
feet higher every hour, you are near the surface and still alive, You've got to
go slow; if you surfaced all at once you'd explode. So it takes you all of three
months to surface, and then a number of days to swim through the cold waters to
the lighthouse. And there you are, out there, in the night, Johnny, the biggest
damn monster in creation. And here's the lighthouse calling to you, with a long
neck like your neck sticking way up out of the water, and a body like your body,
and, most important of all, a voice like your voice. Do you understand now,
Johnny, do you understand?"
The Fog Horn blew.
The monster answered.
I saw it all, I knew it all--the million years of waiting alone, for someone to
come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at the bottom of
the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of reptile-birds,
the swamps dried on the continental lands, the sloths and sabre-tooths had their
day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white ants upon the hills.
The Fog Horn blew.
"Last year," said McDunn, "that creature swam round and round, round and round,
all night. Not coming too near, puzzled, I'd say. Afraid, maybe. And a bit angry
after coming all this way. But the next day, unexpectedly, the fog lifted, the
sun came out fresh, the sky was as blue as a painting. And the monster swam off
away from the heat and the silence and didn't come back. I suppose it's been
brooding on it for a year now, thinking it over from every which way."
The monster was only a hundred yards off now, it and the Fog Horn crying at each
other. As the lights hit them, the monster's eyes were fire and ice, fire and
ice.
"That's life for you," said McDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who
never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves
them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't
hurt you no more."
The monster was rushing at the lighthouse.
The Fog Horn blew.
"Let's see what happens," said McDunn.
He switched the Fog Horn off.
The ensuing minute of silence was so intense that we could hear our hearts
pounding in the glassed area of the tower, could hear the slow greased turn of
the light.
The monster stopped and froze. Its great lantern eyes blinked. Its mouth gaped.
It gave a sort of rumble, like a volcano. It twitched its head this way and
that, as if to seek the sounds now dwindled off into the fog. It peered at the
lighthouse. It rumbled again. Then its eyes caught fire. It reared up, threshed
the water, and rushed at the tower, its eyes filled with angry torment.
"McDunn!" I cried. "Switch on the horn!"
McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he flicked it on, the monster was
rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fish-skin glittering in webs
between the finger-like projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye on the
right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a cauldron into which
I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn cried; the monster cried.