"Campbell, John W Jr - Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

NIGHT
JOHN W. CAMPBELL
Condon was staring through the glasses with a face tense and drawn, all his attention utterly concentrated on that one almost invisible speck infinitely far up in the T)lue sky, and saying over and over again in the most horribly absent-minded way, "My Lord-my Lord---"
Suddenly he shivered and looked down at me, sheer agony in his face. "He's never coming down. Don, he's never coming down---"
I knew it, too-knew it as solidly as I knew the knowledge was impossible. But I smiled and said: "Oh, I wouldn't say that. If anything, I'd fear his coming down. What goes up comes down."
Major Condon trembled all over. His mouth worked horribly for a moment before he could speak. "Talbot-I'm scared 1-I'm horribly scared. You know-you're his assistant-you know he's trying to defeat gravity. Men aren't meant to-it's Wrong-wrong---"
His eyes were glued on those binoculars again, with the same terrible tensity, and now he was saying over and over in that absent-minded way, "wrong-wrong-wrong-~'
Simultaneously he stiffened, and stopped. The dozen or so other men standing on that lonely little emergency field stiffened; then the major crumpled to the ground. I've never before seen a man faint, let alone an army officer with a D.
S. medal. I didn't stop to help him, because I knew something had happened. I grabbed the glasses.
Far, far up in the sky was that little orange speck-far, where there is almost no air, and he had been forced to wear a stratosphere suit with a little alcohol heater. The broad, orange wings were overlaid now with a faint-glowing, pearl-gray light. And it was falling. Slowly, at first, circling aimlessly downward. Then it dipped, rose, and somehow went into a tail spin.
It was horrible. I know I must have breathed, but it didn't seem so. It took minutes for it to fall those miles, despite the speed. Eventually it whipped out of that tail spin-through sheer speed, whipped out and into a power dive. It was a ghastly, flying coffin, hurtling at more than half a thousand miles an hour when it reached the Earth, some fifteen miles away.
The ground trembled, and the air shook with the crash of it. We were in the cars and roaring across the ground long before it hit. I was in Bob's car, with Jeff, his laboratory technician-Bob's little roadster he'd never need again. The engine picked up quickly, and we were going seventy before we left the field, jumped a shallow ditch and hit the road-the deserted, concrete road that led off toward where he must be. The engine roared as Jeff clamped down on the accelerator. Dimly, I heard the major's big car coming along behind us.
Jeff drove like a maniac, but I didn't notice. I knew the thing had done ninety-five but I think we must have done more. The wind whipped tears in my eyes so I couldn't be sure whether I saw mounting smoke and flame or not. With Diesel fuel there shouldn't be-but that plane had been doing things it shouldn't. It had been trying out Carter's antigravity coil.
We shot up the flat, straight road across wide, level country, the wind moaning a requiem about the car. Far ahead I saw the side road that must lead off toward where Bob should be, and lurched to the braking of the car, the whine and sing of violently shrieking tires, then to the skidding corner. It was a sand road; we slithered down it and for all the lightness and power, we slowed to sixty-five, clinging to the seat as the soft sand gripped and clung.
Violently Jeff twisted into a branching cow path, and somehow the springs took it. We braked to a stop a quarter of a mile from the plane.
It was in a fenced field of pasture and wood lot. We leaped the fence, and raced toward it: Jeff got there first, just as the major's car shrieked to a stop behind ours.
The major was cold and pale when he reached us. "Dead," he stated.
And I was very much colder and probably several times as pale. "I don't know!" I moaned. "He isn't then;!"
"Not there!" The major almost screamed it. "He must be
-he has to be. He has no parachute-wouldn't take one. They say he didn't jump---"
I pointed to the plane, and wiped a little cold sweat from my forehead. I felt clammy all over, and my spine prickled. The solid steel of the huge Diesel engine was driven through the stump of a tree, down into the ground perhaps eight or nine feet, and the dirt and rock had splashed under that blow like wet mud.
The wings were on the other side of the field, flattened, twisted straws of dural alloy. The fuselage of the ship was a perfect silhouette-a longitudinal projection that had flattened in on itself, each separate section stopping only as it hit the ground.
The great torus coil with its strangely twined wrappings of hair-fine bismuth wire was intact! And bent over it, twisted, utterly wrecked by the impact, was the main-wing stringer- the great dural-alloy beam that supported most of the ship's weight in the air. It was battered, crushed on those hair-fine, fragile bismuth wires-and not one of them was twisted or misplaced or so much as skinned. The back frame of the ponderous Diesel engine-the heavy supercliarger was the anvil of that combination-was cracked and splintered. And not one wire of the hellish bismuth coil was strained or skinned or displaced.
And the red pulp that should have been there-the red pulp that had been a man-wasn't. It simply wasn't there at all. He hadn't left the plane. In the clear, cloudless air, we could see that. He was gone.
We examined it, of course. A farmer came, and another, and looked, and talked. Then several farmers came in old, dilapidated cars with their wives and families, and watched.
We set the owner of the property on watch and went away
-went back to the city for workmen and a truck with a derrick. Dusk was falling. It would be morning before we could do anything, so we went away.
Five of us-the major of the army air force, Jeff Rodney,
the two Douglass Co. men whose names I never remembered and I-sat in my-our-room. Bob's and Jeff's and mine. We'd been sitting there for hours trying to talk, trying to think, trying to remember every little detail, and trying to forget every ghastly detail. We couldn't remember the detail that explained it, nor forget the details that rode and harried us.
And the telephone rang. I started. Then slowly got up and answered. A strange voice, flat and rather unpleasant, said: "Mr. Talbot?"
"Yes."
It was Sam Gantry, the farmer we'd left on watch. "There's a man here."
"Yes? What does he want?"
"I dunno. I dunno where he came from. He's either dead or out cold. Gotta funny kind of an aviator suit on, with a glass face on it. He looks all blue, so I guess he's dead."
"Lord! Bob! Did you take the helmet off?" I roared.
"No, sir, no-no, sir. We just left him the way he was."
"His tanks have run out. Listen. Take a hammer, a wrench, anything, and break that glass faceplate! Quick! We'll be there."
Jeff was moving. The major was, too, and the others. I made a grab for the half-empty bottle of Scotch, started out, and ducked back into the closet. With the oxygen bottle under my arm I jumped into the crowded little roadster just as Jeff started it moving. He turned on the horn, and left it that way.
We dodged, twisted, jumped and stopped with jerks in traffic, then leaped into smooth, roaring speed out toward the farmer's field. The turns were familiar now; we scarcely slowed for them, sluing around them. This time Jeff charged through the wire fence. A headlight popped; there was a shrill scream of wire, the wicked zing of wire scratching across the hood and mud guards, and we were bouncing across the field.
There were two lanterns on the ground; three men carried others; more men squatted down beside a still figure garbed in a fantastic, bulging, airproof stratosphere suit. They looked at us, open-mouthed as we skidded to a halt, moving aside as the major leaped out and dashed over with the Scotch. I followed close behind with the oxygen bottle.
Bob's faceplate was shattered, his face blue, his lips blue
and flecked with froth. A long gash across his cheek from the shattered glass bled slowly. The major lifted his head without a word, and glass tinkled inside the helmet as he tried to force a little whisky down his throat.
"Wait!" I called. "Major, give him artificial respiration, and this will bring him around quicker-better." The major nodded, and rose, rubbing his arm with a peculiar expression.
"That's cold!" he said, as he flipped Bob over, and straddled his back. I held the oxygen bottle under Bob's nose as the major swung back in his arc, and let the raw, cold oxygen gas flow into his nostrils.
In ten seconds Bob coughed, gurgled, coughed violently, and took a deep shuddering breath. His face turned pink almost instantly under that lungful of oxygen, and I noticed with some surprise that he seemed to exhale almost nothing, his body absorbing the oxygen rapidly.
He coughed again; then: "I could breathe a heck of a sight better if you'd get off my back," he said. The major jumped up, and Bob turned over and sat up. He waved me aside, and spat. "I'm-all right," he said softly.
"Lord, man, what happened?" demanded the major.
Bob sat silent for a minute. His eyes had the strangest look -a hungry look-as he gazed about him. He looked at the trees beyond and at the silent, watching men in the light of the lanterns; then up, up to where a myriad stars gleamed and danced and flickered in the clear night sky.
"I'm back," he said softly. Then suddenly he shivered, and looked horribly afraid. "But-I'll have to be-then-too."
He looked at the major for a minute, and smiled faintly. And at the two Douglass Co. men. "Your plane was all right. I started up on the wings, as arranged, went way up, till I thought surely I was at a safe height, where the air wasn't too dense and the field surely wouldn't reach to Earth-Lord!- reach to Earth! I didn't guess how far that field extended. It touched Earth-twice.