"Philip Jose Farmer - The Wind Whales Of Ishmael" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

No man dared say a word or even sigh. Each feared that if he brought the attention of whatever
force it was that crouched above them, he would bring something down that would be worse than death.
A wind blew in from the west, rippling the sea, flut-tering the sails, then pushing them.
The Rachel heeled to starboard; the wind passed; the Rachel righted herself.
Silence again.
 The silence and the agony of waiting were beaten out into a thin wire of apprehension.
What was coming?
Ishmael wondered if he had been spared from the horrible but quick doom of the men of the
Pequod for something unimaginably dreadful. Something that God might imagine but would repress in His
mind.
What followed could be recalled afterward only be-cause he, Ishmael, could look back and
reconstruct. So that he did not so much remember as imagine. At the time, he could not possibly have
known what was hap-pening. All was strangeness and horror.
With no more noise than of a ghost gliding over the ocean, the sea disappeared.
Night was replaced by day.
The Rachel was falling.
Ishmael was too terrified to cry out, or, if he did cry out, he was too stunned to hear himself.
Falling through air, the Rachel turned over quickly, the weight of the masts and sails revolving her
to star-board because she had been leaning very slightly in that direction when the sea evaporated so
quickly.
As if shot from a sling, Ishmael went out into the abyss and then was sinking through the whistling
sea of atmosphere by the side of the ship. He waved his arms and kicked his feet as if he were trying to
swim.
The moon was with them, though its companion, night, had deserted it. But the moon was
enormous, fully three times as large, perhaps four times as large, as that he had known.
The sun was at its zenith. It was a sullenly red ball that had swelled fourfold.
The sky was a dark blue.
The air screamed past him and through him.
Below him -- no, below the Rachel -- was a strange craft sailing through the air.
He had no time to learn anything but its alienness and the sensation that it had been built by
intelligence. He did see some human beings running about it, and then the tip of the mainmast of the
Rachel crashed into it, and the rest of the ship followed, and the strange vessel of the air broke in two.
Perhaps a hundred feet below the two vessels, and below him, was what he had thought was the
top of the mountain. It was a vast russet-streaked, mushroom-colored thing which was the plateau-land
of the peak of a mountain that towered miles high.
He struck it, was hurt, and passed through a layer of something like thin flesh.
Again and again, he struck a layer and tore through it, each time feeling a jar that hurt but each
time be-ing slowed.
Then something ropy flashed by. He grabbed for it, missed, felt another ropy thing slide through
his hands, burning them. He cried out, plunged on through layer after layer, struck something solid that
exploded like a balloon, deafening him and filling his nose and burn-ing his eyes with a choking and
burning gas.
His hands closed on something he could not see.
He swung out, far out, almost losing his grip. He blinked his eyes to wash out the pain with tears.
Then he swung back and, still swiftly, but not fatally, fell at the end of a pulpy root attached to a
corpse-colored bladder which was flesh or plant or a mixture thereof.
He was still breaking through paper-thin skins. He understood, without thinking about it, that
there were thousands of bladders of many sizes that must hold up the thing, whatever it was.
The last layer broke beneath his feet so reluctantly that he thought for a moment that he would
have to kick through it. He feared to keep on falling, but he feared even more being stranded inside this