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

Others, adventuring through the past, must too have met this peril, mest have succumb~d to it in the weakness of their inborn love for the green Moon-world. But he had ncr such weakness. Nothing was so important as life—his own life, here and now. He would not surrender. Deep down under the veneer of his civilized self lay a bed-rock of pure savage power that nothing on any world he knew had ever tested beyond its strength. It supported him now against the anger of- divinity, the unshakable foundation Of his resolution not to yield. -
And slowly, slowly’ the ravening hunger abated its fury about him. It could not absorb what refused to surrender, and~ all its fury could not terrorize him into acquiescence. This, then, was why the Three had demanded and reiterated the necessity for submission to their hunger. They had not the• power to overcome that unshakable life-urge if it were not willingly put aside, and they dared not let the world they-~-~ terrorized know this weakness in their strer1~th. For a flash-~ ~ ing moment he visioned the vampire Three, battening on
race that dared not defy them for love of the beautiful cities~ the soft gold days and Earth-bright miracles of nights that~ counted more to mankind than its own life counted. But iti was ended now. - :1
One last furnace-blast of white-hot hunger raved aroun4l Smith s stubbornness But whatever vampinc things thel
were, spawned in what unknown, eons-forgotten place, the
Three who were One had not the power to break down that last rock-steady savagery in which all that was Smith rooted deep. And at last, in one final burst of typhoon-fury, which
roared about him in tornado-blasts of hunger and defeat, the
vacuum ceased to be.
For one blinding instant sight flashed unbearably through his brain. He saw sleeping Seles, the green Moonworld that
time itself was to forget pearl-pale under the glory of risen Earth, washed with the splendor of a brighter night than man was to know again, the mighty globe swimming through seas of floating atmosphere, veiled in it, glorious for one last brief instant in the wonder of its misty continents, its pearly seas. Baloise the Beautiful slept under the luminance of highriding Earth. For one last radiant moment the exquisite Moon-world floated through its dreampale darkness that no world in space was ever to equal again, nor any descendant of the race that knew it ever wholly forget.
And then—disaster. In a stunned, remote way Smith was
aware of a high, ear-splitting wail that grew louder, louder— intolerably louder until his very brain could no longer endure the agony of its sound. And over Baloise, over Seles and all who dwelt thereon, a darkness began to fall. High-swimming Earth shimmered through gathering dark, and from the rolling green hills and verdant meadows and silver sea of Seles the atmosphere ripped away. In long, opalescent streamers, bright under the light of Earth, the air of Seles was forsaking the world it cloaked. Not in gradual dissipation, but in abrupt.
angry destruction as if the invisible hands of the Three were tearing it in long bright ribbons from the globe of Seles.—.so the atmosphere fell away.
That was the last Smith saw of it as darkness closed him in—Seles, lovely even in its destruction, a little green jewel shimmering with color and brightness, unrolling from its cloak of life as the long, streaming ribbons of rainbowy translucency tore themselves away and trailed in the void behind, slowly paling into the blackness of space.
Then darkness closed in about him, and oblivion rolled ~ver him and nothing—nothing.
He opened his eyes, and startlingly, New York’i steel ~owers were all about him, the hum of traffic in his ears.
Irresistibly his eyes sought the sky, where a moment before, so it seemed to him, the treat bright globe of pearly Earth hung luminous. And then, realization coming buck slowly, he lowered his eyes and met across the table the wide, haunted stare of the little priest of the Moon-people. The face he- saw shocked him. It had aged ten years in the incalculable interval of his journey back into the past. Anguish, deeper than any personal anguish could strike, had graven sharp lines into his unearthly pallor, and the great strange eyes were nightmare-haunted.
“It was through me, then,” he was whispering, as if to himself. “Of all my race I was the one by whose hand Seles died. Oh, gods—”
“I did it!” Smith broke in harshly, driven out of his habit of silence in a blind effort to alleviate something of that unbearable anguish. “I was the one!”
“No—you were the instrument, I the wielder. I sent you back. I am the destroyer of Baloise and Nial and ivory-white Ingala, and all the gre~ loveliness of our lost,world. How can! ever look up again by night upon the bare white skull of the world I slew? It was I—I!”
“What the devil the you two talking about?” demanded Yarol across the table. “I didn’t see a thing, except a lot of darkness and lights, and a sort of moon....”
“And yet”-~—that haunted - whisper went on, obliviously—’ ‘yet I have seen the Three in their temple. No other of all my race ever saw them before, for no living memory ever returned out of that temple save the memory that broke them. Of all my race only I know the secret of the Disaster. Our legends tell of what the exiles saw, looking up that night in terror through the thick air of Earth—but I know!
And no man of flesh and blood can bear that knowledge long—who murdered-a world by his blundering. Oh gods of
Seles—help me!” -
His Moon-white hanth groped blindly over the table,
found the square package that had cost him so dear a price. He stumbled to his feet. Smith rose too, actuated by some inarticulate emotion he could not have named. But the Moonpnest shook his head
“No,” he said, as if in answer to some question of his own mind, “you are not to blame for what happened so many eons ago—and yet in the last few minutes. This tangle Of time and space, and the disaster that a living man can bring to something dead millenniums ago-it is far beyond our narrow
grasp of understanding. I was chosen to be the vessel of that
disaster—yet not I alone am responsible, for this was ordained from time’s beginning. I could not have changed it had I known at the beginning what the end must be. It is not for what you did, but for what you know now—that you must
die!”
The words had not wholly left his lips before he was
swinging up his square parcel like a deadly weapon. Close against Smith’s face he held it, and the shadow of death was in his Moon-pale eyes and dark upon his anguished white face. For the flash of an instant it seemed to Smith that a blaze of intolerable light was bursting out all around the square of the package, though actually he could see nothing but the commonplace outlines of it in the priest’s white hands.
For the breath of an instant almost too brief to~ register on his brain, death brushed him hungrily. But in that instant as the threatening hands swung up there was a burst of bluewhite flame behind the priest’s back, the familiar crackle of a gun. The little mati’s face turned livid with pain for an instant, and then peace in a great gush of calmness washed across it, blanking the anguished dark eyes. He slumped.
sidewise, the square box faffing.
Across the huddle of his body on the floor Yarol ‘s crouched figure loomed, slipping the heat-gun back into its holster as he glanced across his shoulder.
“Come on—come on! “he whispered urgently. “Let’s get outof here!” -
There was a shout from behind Smith, the beat of running
feet~ He cast one covetous glance at the fallen square of that mysterious package, but it was a fleeting one as be cleared the body in a leap and on Yarol’s flying heels made for the lower
- ramp to the crowded level beneath. He would never know.