"Tom Purdom - The Mists of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

THE MISTS OF TIME
by Tom Purdom

In a year of anniversary celebrations, the following story
commemorates a particularly significant milestone. Tom Purdom
sold his first story “Grieve for a Man” in February 1957 and it
appeared exactly fifty years ago in the August issue of Fantastic
Universe—edited by Hans Stefan Santesson. Tom’s second sale hit
the stands at the same time, in the August 1957 Science Fiction
Quarterly, which was edited by Robert Lowndes. Of these two tales,
Tom says, “I didn’t hear about the second sale until the magazine
came out, so I’ve always considered the Fantastic Universe story my
first sale. The first chapter of the literary memoir I’m in the process
of posting at www.philart.net/tompurdom discusses both stories.
I’ve also posted “Grieve for a Man,” in case any Asimov’s readers
would like to see what my first appearance in print looked like.” Tom
tells us 1957 was important to him for other reasons as well. “It was
the year the Russians launched Sputnik. I had been a space travel
enthusiast since I was fourteen (I actually became interested in
space travel before I started reading SF). Sputnik probably had a
permanent effect on my personality. I belonged to one of the last
groups to grow up hearing our elders tell us space travel was
impossible. Sputnik proved we younger people knew what we were
talking about. In one year, I sold my first story, reached full legal
adulthood, met my wife, and acquired a permanent, possibly
insufferable, confidence in my own judgment.”

****

The cry from the lookout perked up every officer, rating, and common
seaman on deck. The two masted brig they were intercepting was being
followed by sharks—a sure sign it was a slaver. Slave ships fouled the
ocean with a trail of bodies as they worked their way across the Atlantic.

John Harrington was standing in front of the rear deckhouse when the
midshipman’s yell floated down from the mast. His three officers were
loitering around him with their eyes fixed on the sails three miles off their
port bow—a mass of wind filled cloth that had aroused, once again, the
hope that their weeks of tedious, eventless cruising were coming to an end.

The ship rolling under their own feet, HMS Sparrow, was a sixty-foot
schooner—one of the smallest warships carried on the rolls of Her
Majesty’s navy. There was no raised quarterdeck her commander could
pace in majestic isolation. The officers merely stood in front of the
deckhouse and looked down a deck crowded with two boats, spare spars,
and the sweating bodies of crewmen who were constantly working the big
triangular sails into new positions in response to the shipmaster’s efforts to
draw the last increment of movement from the insipid push of the African
coastal breezes. A single six-pound gun, mounted on a turntable,
dominated the bow.