"Moore, C L - Lost Paradise UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

sick fright, through the gloom. -
The dimness brightened as they advanced. More and more inexplicable in Smith’s mind grew the wonder that, though fear was turning the Moon-dweller’s very brain- icy with dread, yet he went unhesitatingly forward, no compulsion driving him but his own will. It was death ‘he went to—there was no doubt about that now, from the glimpses he had of his
host’s mind—a death from which by instinct he shrank with~ every fiber of his being. But he went on.
Now walls were becoming visible through the dim fog of
the darkness. They were smooth walls, black, unfeatured. The interior of this great dark building -was appalling in its very simplicity. Nothing but a wide black corridor Whose walls rose into invisibility overhead. Contrasting with the ornateness of every other man-made surface in Baloise, the stark severity of the building struck a note of added terror into the numbed brain of the man who walked here.
The darkness paled and brightened. The corridor was widening. Presently its walls had fallen back outside range of sight; and over a black, unlustered floor, through misty brightness the Moon-man walked forward to his death;
The room into which the hail bad widened was immense.
Smith thought it must comprise the whole interior of the great dark building; for many minutes passed while his host paced
steadily, slowly forward over the darkness of the floor.
Gradually through that queer bright dimness a flame began
to glow. It danced in the misUike the light of a windblown fire, brightening, dimming, flaring up again so that the mist pulsed with its brilliance. There was the regularity of life in that pulsing.
It was a wall of pale flame, stretching through the misty
dimness as far as the eye could reach on either side. The man paused before it, with bowed head, and he tried tO speak.
Terror thickened his voice so that it was only on the third attempt that he managed to articulate, very low, in a choked voice, “Hear mc, 0 Mighty. I am come.”
‘In the silence alter his vOice ceased, the wall of beating flame ffickered once again, like a heart’s beat, and thea rolled back on both sides like curtains. 3eyond the back-drawn flame a high-roofed hollow in the mist loomed dimly. It had no more tangibility than the mistitsell, the inside ofasphere of dim clarity. And in that mist-walled hollow three gods’sat. Sat? They crouched, dreadfully, hungrily, with such a bestial ravening in their poise that only gods could maintain the awful dignity which veiled them with terror despite the ugly
humped hunger of their posture. -
This one glimpse through glazing eyes Smith caught as the Moonman flung himself face down on the black floor, the breath stoppin~g in his throat, choking against unbearable terror as a drowning man chokes against sea-water. But as the eyes through which he looked lost sight of the three ravenous figures, Smith had an instant’s glimpse of the shadow behind them, monstrous on the curved mist-wall that hollowed them in, cast waveringly by the back-drawn flame. And it was a single shadow. These three were One.
‘And the One spoke. In a voice like the lick of flames, tenuous as the mist that reflected it, terrible as the voice of death itself, the One said:
“What mortal dares eater our immortal Presence?”
“One whose god-appointed cycle is complete,” gasped
the prostrate man, his voice coming in little puffs as if he bad
been running hard. “One who fulfills his share of his race’s
debt to the Three who are One.”
The voice of the One had been a voice full, complete, an
individual speaking. Now out of the dim hollow where the
three crouched a thin, ifickering voice, like hot flame, less
than ‘full, less than complete, came quavering.
“Be it remembered,” said the thin, hot little voice, “that
all the world of Seles owes it existence to ourselves, who by
our might hold fire and air and water around its globe. Be it remembered that only through ourselves does the flesh of life clothe this little world’s bare bones. Be it remembered!”
The man on the floor shuddered in one lo~g quiver of acquiescence. And Smith, his mind aware- as that other mind was aware, knew that it was true. The Moon’s gravity was too weak, even in this long-vanished era, to hold its cloak of life-supporting air without the aid of some other force than its own. Why these Three furnished that power he did not know, but he was beginning to guess.’
A second little voice, hungry as flame, took up the ritual chant as the first died away.
“Be it remembered that only for a price do we wrap the robe of life about Seles’ bones. Be that bargain remembered that the progenitors of the race of Seles made with the Three who are One, in the very long ago when even the gods were young. Let the price be,not forgotten that every man must pay at the end of his appointed cycle. Be it remembered that only through our divine hunger Can mankind reach us to pay his vow. All who live owe us the debt of their living, and by the age-old pact of their forefathers must return when we summon them into the shadow that gives their loved world life.”
Again the prostrate man shuddered, deep and coldly, acknowledging the ritual truth. And a third voice quavered out of that misty hollow with aflame’s ffickering hunger in its sound. -
“Be it remembered that all who come to pay the race’s debt and buy anew our favor that their world may live, must come to us willingly, with no resistance against our divine hunger—must surrender without struggle. And be it remembered that if so much as one man alone dares resist our will, then in that instant is our power withdrawn, and all our anger called down upon the world of Seles. Let one man struggle against our desire, and the world of Seles goes bare to the void, all life upon it ceasing in a breath. Be that remembered!”
On the floor the Moonman’s body shivered again. Through his mind ran one last ache of love and longing for the beautiful world whose greenness and Earth-lit wonder his death was to preserve. Death was a little thing, if by it Seles lived.
In one full, round thunder the One said terribly, “Come you willingly into our Presence?”
From the prone man’s hidden face a voice choked, “Willingly—that Soles may live.” -
And the voice of the One pulsed through the flamewashed
dimness so deeply that the ears did not hear, and only the beat of the Mooninan’s heart, the throbbing of his blood, caught the low thunder of the sodS’ command.
“Then come!” -
He stirred. Very slowly he got to his feet. -He faced the three. And for the firs’t’time Smith knew a quickened fear for his own safety. Heretofore the awe and terror he had shared with the Moon-host had been solely for the man himself. But now—was death not reaching out for him no less than for his host? For he knew of no way to dissociate his own spectator mind from the mind with which it was united that it might be aware of this fragment of the measureless past. And when the Moonman went forward into oblivion, must not oblivion engulf his own mind too? This, then, was what the little priest had meant when he told them that some, adventuring backward through the minds of their forebears, never returned. Death in one guise or another must have swallowed them up
with the minds they loqked through. Death yawned for himself, now, if he could not escape. -For the first time he
struggled, testing his independence. And it was futile. He could not break away.
With bowed head the Moonman stepped forward through the curtain of flame. It hissed hotly on either side, and then it was behind and he was close to that dim hell where the three gods sat, their shadow hovering terribly behind them on the mist. And it looked in that uncertain light, as if the three strained forward eagerly, hunger ravenous in every dreadful line of them, and the shadow behind spread itself like a waiting mouth.
Then with a swishing roar the flame-curtains swept to behind him, and darkness like the dark of death itself fell blindingly upon the hollow of the Three. Smith knew naked terror as he felt the mind he bad hidden thus far falter as a horse falters beneath its rider—fail as a mount fails—and he was falling, falling into gulfs of vertiginous terror, emptier than the space between the worlds, a blind and empty hungriness that outrayened vacuum itself. -
He did not fight it. He could not. It was too tremendous. But he did not yield.-One small conscious entity in an infinity of pure hunger, while sucking emptiness raved around him, he was stubborn and unwavering. The hunger of the Three must never before have known anything but acquiescence to the debt man owed them, and now fury roared through the vacuum of their hunger more terribly than any mortal-. mind could combat. In the midst of it, Smith clung stubbornly to his ificker—of consciousness, incapable of doing anythingmore than resisPfeebly the ravenous desire that sucked at his life.
Dimly he realized what he was doing. It was the death of a world he compassed, if resistance to the hunger of the Three meant what they had threatened. It meant the death of every living thing on the satellite—of the girl in the Earth-bright garden;- of all who walked Baloise ‘s streets, of Baknse herself in the grinding eons, unprotected from the bombarding
meteors that would turn this sweet green world into a pitted skull. - -
But the urge to live was blind in him. He could not have relinquished it if he would, so deeply rooted is the life-desire in us all, the raw, animal desperatioi~ against extinction. He would not die—he would iie4~ surrender, let the price bewhat it might. He could not fight that blind ravening that typhooned about him, but he would not submit. He was simply a passive stubbornness against the hunger of the Three, while eons swirled about him and time ceased and nothing had existence but himself, his living, desperate self, rebellious against death. ~