"Murray Leinster - The Best of Murray Leinster (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

while since, but he was himself again now. The smell of frying filled the
kitchen. His wife cooked. Cyrus Harding ate.
He made noises as he emptied his plate. His hands were. gnarled and
work-worn, but his expression was of complacent satisfaction. He looked at a
calendar hung on the wall, a Christmas sentiment from the Bryan Feed &
Fertilizer Co., in Bryan, Ohio.
"Sheriff's goin' to sell out Amos today," he said comfortably. "I figger
I'll get that north forty cheap."
His wife said tiredly, "He's been offerin' to sell it to you for a
year."
"Yep," agreed Cyrus Harding more complacently still. "Comin' down on the
price, too. But nobody'll bid against me at the sale. They know I want it bad,
and I ain't a good neighbor to have when somebuddy takes somethin' from under
my nose. Folks know it. I'll git it a lot cheaper'n Amos offered it to me for.
He waited to sell it to meet his interest and hold on another year. I'll git
it for half that."
He stood up and wiped his mouth. He strode to the door.
"That hired man shoulda got a good start with his harrowin'," he said
expansively. "I'll take a look and go over to the sale."
He went to the kitchen door and opened it. Then his mouth dropped open.
The view from this doorway was normally that of a not especially neat
barnyard, with beyond it farmland flat as a floor and cultivated to the very
fence rails, with a promising crop of corn as a border against the horizon.
Now the view was quite otherwise. All was normal as far as the barn. But
beyond the barn was delirium.
Huge, spreading tree ferns soared upward a hundred feet. Lacy, foliated
branches formed a roof of incredible density above sheer jungle such as no man
on earth had ever seen before. The jungles of the Amazon basin were parkilke
by comparison with its thickness. It was a riotous tangle of living
vegetationin which growth was battle, and battle was life, and life was
deadly, merciless conflict.
No man could have forced his way ten feet through such a wilderness.
From it came a fetid exhalation which was part decay and part lush, rank,
growing things, and part the overpowering perfumes of glaringly vivid flowers.
It was jungle such as paleobotanists have described as existing in the
Carboniferous period; as the source of our coal beds.
"It-it ain't so!" said Cyrus Harding weakly. "It ain't so!"
His wife did not reply. She had not seen. Wearily, she began to clean up
after her lord and master's meal.
He went down the kitchen steps, staring and shaken. He moved toward this
impossible apparition which covered his crops. It did not disappear as he
neared it. He went within twenty feet of it and stopped, still staring, still
unbelieving, beginning to entertain the monstrous supposition that he had gone
insane.
Then, something moved in the jungle. A long, snaky neck, feet thick at
its base and tapering to a mere sixteen inches behind a head the size of a
barrel. The neck reached out the twenty feet to him. Cold eyes regarded him
abstractedly. The mouth opened. Cyrus Harding screamed.
His wife raised her eyes. She looked through the open door and saw the
jungle. She saw the jaws close upon her husband. She saw colossal, abstracted