"Moore, C L - The Tree of Life UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

In the instant of release his hand swept like an unloosed spring, of its own volition, straight for the butt of his powergun. He was dragging it free as the Tree’s branches snatched him from its priestess’ hands. The fire-colored blossoms burnt his flesh as they closed round him, the hot branches gripping like the touch of ravenous fingers. The whole Tree was hot and throbbing .with a dreadful travesty of fleshly life as it whipped him aloft into the hovering bulk of incarnate horror above.
In the instantaneou~s upward leap of the flower-tipped limbs Smith fought like a demon to free his gun-hand from the gripping coils. For the first time Thag knew rebellion in his yery clutches, and the ecstasy of that music which bad dinned in Smith’s ears so strongly that by now it seemed almost silence was swooping down a long arc into wrath, and the branches tightened with hot insistency, lifting the tebelli~ ous offering into Thag’s monstrous, indescribable bulk.
But even as they rose, Smith was twisting in their clutch to maneuver his hand into a position from which he could blast
that undulant tree trunk into nothingness. He knew intuitively~ the futility of firing up into Thag’s imponderable mass. Thag was not of the world he knew; the flame blast might well be harmless to that mighty hoverer in the twilight. But at the Tree’s root, where Thag’s essential being merged from the imponderable to the material, rooting in earthly soil, he should be vulnerable if he were vulnerable at all. Struggling in the tight, hot coils, breathing the nameless essence of horror, Smith fought to free his hand.
The music that had rung so long in his ears was changing as the branches lifted him higher, l~sing its melody and merging by swift degrees into a hum of vast and vibrant power that deepeiIed in intensity as the limbs drew him upward into
-Thag’s monstrous bulk, the singing force of a thing mightier than any dynamo ever built. Blinded and dazed by the force thundering through every atom of his body, he twisted his hand in one last, con~iulsive effort, and fired. ‘ -
He saw the flame leap in a dazzling gush straight for the trunk below. It struck. He heard the sizzle of annihilated matter. He saw the trunk quiver convulsively from the very roots ‘and the whole fabulous Tree shook once with an ominous tremor. But before that tremor could shiver up the branches to him the hum of the living dynamo which was closing round his body ~hrilled up arcs of pure intensity into a thundering silence.
Then without a moment’s warning the world exploded. So instantaneously did all this happen that the gun-blast’s roar had not yet echoed into silence before a mightier sound than the brain could bear exploded outward from the very center of his own being. Before the awful power of it everything reeled into a shaken oblivion. He felt himself failing.. .
A queer, penetrating light shining upon his closed eyes roused Smith by degrees into wakefulness again. He lifted heavy lids and stared upward into the unwinking eye of Mars’
racing nearer moon. He lay there blinking dazedly for a while before enough of memory returned to rouse him. Then he sat up painfully, for every fiber of him ached, and stared round
on a scene of the wildest destruction. He lay in the midst of a wide, rough circle which held nothing but powdered stone. About it, rising raggedly in the moving moonlight, the blocks of time-forgotten Illar loomed.
But they were no ‘longer piled one upon another -in a rough travesty of the city they once had shaped. Some force mightier than any of man’s explosives seemed to have hurled them with such violence from their beds that their very atoms had been disrupted by the force of it, crumbling them into dust. And in the very center of the havoc lay Smith, unhurt.
He stared in bewilderment about the moonlight ruins. In the silence it seemed to him that the very air still quivered in shocked vibrations. And as he stared he realized that no force save one could have wrought such destruction upon the ancient stones. Nor was there any explosive known to man which would have wrought this strange, pulverizing havoc upon the blocks of Illar. That force had hummed unbearably through the living dynamo of Thag, a force so powerful that space itself had bent to enclose it. Suddenly he realized what must have happened.
Not Illar, but Thag himself had warped the walls of space to enfold the twiit world, and nothing but Thag ‘s living power could have held It so bent ~o segregate the little, terror-ridden land inviolate.
Then when the Tree’s roots parted, Thag’s anchorage in the material world failed and in one great gust of unthinkable energy the warped space-walls had ceased to bend. Those arches of solid space had snapped back into their original pattern, hurling the land and all its dwellers into-into-His mind balked in the effort to picture what must have happened, into what ultimate dimension those denizens must have vanished.
Only himself, enfolded deep in Thag’s very essence, the intolerable power of the explosion had not touched. So when the warped space-curve ceased to be, and Thag ‘s hold upon
reality failed,’ he must have been dropped back out-of the
dissolving folds upon the spot where the Tree had stood in the
space~circled world, through that vanished world-floor into the spot he had been snatched from in the instant of the dim, land’s dissolution. It must have happened after the terrible force of the explosion had spent itself, before Thag dared move even himself through the walls of changing energy into his own far land again.
Smith sighed and lifted a hand to his throbbing head, rising slowly to his feet. What time had elapsed he could not guess, but he must assume that the Patrol still searched for him. Wearily he set out across the circle of havoc toward the nearest shelter which Illar offered. The dust rose in ghostly, moonlit -clouds under his feet.