"Raymond Z. Gallun - Dawn of the Demigods Or, People Minus X" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gallun Raymond Z)

snaky and odd. Here was another gift, ordered by Uncle Mitch from a friend in
the region of the Asteroids. The font was an artifact of a race contemporary
with the Martians who had also lost their fight to master nature and
themselves through knowledge. The font had been found floating free in space,
among the wreckage of a planet blown to pieces ages back.
Eddie was thinking of such things. He was also thinking of neighborhood
pals, to whom he had bragged about his uncle and his expected arrival.
As for what happened at that moment: there was trans-spatial warning,
radioed out fifteen seconds ahead, telling of forces gone hopelessly out of
control in the lunar laboratories. But Eddie's set was not functioning, and he
did not hear it.
Beyond the windows of his room there was just calm, pale moonlight. The
Moon looked little different than it had always looked, except for the blue
spots of the atmosphere domes of the great mining centers.
But then came the intolerable blue-white light. Perhaps, somewhere,
exposed instruments measured its intensity. On the roofs of meteorological
stations, maybe. Say conservatively that, for the space of a few seconds, it
was five hundred times as strong as full sunshine.
Night was broken off. But there was no day like this. For one fragment
of a second Eddie glanced at the window. Shadows seemed gone, utterly. Even
dark things like tree trunks reflected so much light that they all but
vanished in the shimmering glare. As yet, it was a soundless phenomenon.
Eddie shut his eyes and buried his face in his pillow. This reflex
action, partly as natural as terror and partly the result of training for
emergencies at school, saved his vision. He might have screamed, had he been
able to find his voice. Distantly, he heard human sounds that increased the
sickness in his stomach. A gentle scene and mood, product of science, had been
utterly shattered by forces of the same origin.
He did not see the fuzzy blob of incandescence that bloomed in the sky
and expanded slowly for many seconds. In fact, no one saw it; only cameras,
fitted with special dark filters, would have been able to do so. For living
eyes would have been charred by that splendor.
He heard his mother calling his name. Keeping his eyelids tightly
closed and an elbow bent over them, he fumbled his way to the hall, and to
her. They dropped to the floor and huddled there.




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 Outside, voices died away. By then the devilish glory in the sky was
fading a little, too, at the edges. Only the heart of the great blob still
blazed supernally, with its millions of degrees of heat. Around it was a
cooling fog of dust and gases that masked the hell within it.
The world grew still for a few moments, as it does at the center of a
typhoon. Then there was a great, soft roaring. The shock wave of expanded,
rarefied gases, speeding at many hundreds of miles per second, striking the
upper terrestrial atmosphere, and pressing down. Eddie could feel the pressure
of it, transmitted by the air -- a light but definite punching inward of his
flesh, from all sides.