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

unconsidered scribble is now examined and inspected and discussed by the
greatest minds of our time and space. And perhaps it is quite probable he may
have invented a word for the scope of the catastrophe we escaped. We have none
as yet.
There is no word to describe a disaster in which not only the earth but
our whole solar system might have been destroyed; not only our solar system
but our galaxy; not only our galaxy but every other island universe in all of
the space we know; more than that, the destruction of all space as we know it;
and even beyond that the destruction of time, meaning not only the
obliteration of present and future but even the annihilation of the past so
that it would never have been. And then, besides, those other strange states
of existence we learned of, those other universes, those other pasts and
futures all to be shattered into'nothingness. There is no word for such a
catastrophe.
It would be interesting to know what Professor Minott termed it to
himself, as he coolly prepared to take advantage of the one chance in four of
survival, if that should be the one to eventuate. But it is easier to wonder
how he felt on the evening before the fifth of June, in 1935. We do not know.
We cannot know. All we can be certain of is how we felt and what happened.
It was half past seven a.m. of June 5, 1935. The city of Joplin,
Missouri, awaked from, a comfortable, summer-night sleep. Dew glistened upon
grass blades and leaves and the filmy webs of morning spiders glittered like
diamond dust in the early sunshine. In the most easternly suburb a high-school
boy, yawning, came somnolently out of his house to mow the lawn before
schooltime. A rather rickety family car roared, a block away. It backfired,
stopped, roared again, anti throttled down to a steady, waiting hum. Then,
voices of children sounded among the houses. A colored washerwoman appeared,
striding beneath the trees which lined this strictly residential street.
From an upper window a radio blatted: "one, two, three, four! Higher,
now three, four! Put your weight into it! two, three, four!" The radio
suddenly squawked and began to emit an insistent, mechanical shriek which
changed again to a squawk and then a terrific sound as of all the static of
ten thousand thunderstorms on the air at once. Then it was silent.
The high-school boy leaned mournfully on the pushbar of the lawn mower.
At the instant the static ended, the boy sat down suddenly on the dew-wet
grass. The colored woman reeled and grabbed frantically at the nearest tree
trunk. The basket of wash toppled and spilled in a snowstorm of starched,
varicolored clothing. Howls of terror from children. Sharp shrieks from women.
"Earthquake! Earthquake!" Figures appeared running, pouring out of houses.
Someone fled out to a sleeping porch, slid down a supporting column, and
tripped over a rosebush in his pajamas. In seconds, it seemed, the entire
population of the street was out of doors. And then there was a
queer, blank silence. There was no earthquake. No house had fallen. No chimney
had cracked. Not so much as a dish or windowpane had made a sound in smashing.
The sensation every human being had felt was not an actual shaking of the
ground. There had been moyement, yes, and of the earth, but no such movement
as any human being had ever dreamed of before. These people were to learn of
that movement much lafer. Now they stared blankly at each other.
And in the sudden, dead silence broken only by the hum of an idling car
and the wail of a frightened baby, a new sound became audible. It was the