"054 (B089) - Ost (The Magic Island) (1937-08) - Lester Dent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

OST
A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson

Chapter I. THE CITY THAT WAS NOT THERE
IT was remarkable that anything Ben Brasken did should astound the world.
Ben Brasken was what is sometimes called "a poor fish." This had no connection with his being a sailor. He was meek, abused, and did not have many manly qualities of the hairy-chested kind. He was short. He was thin. He had never won a fight, although he had had several. He was as poor as a church mouse, and somewhat resembled one. Not that he went to church. They did not have a church on the Benny Boston. All they had was grease, heat, smell, hard work and a hard skipper and a first mate with bucko leanings.
Ben Brasken had one quality. It was this one thing that got him into all his trouble. And got some other people into theirs. Which also caused some heads to turn gray, and a few people to die.
To say nothing of the incredible chain of things it started happening.
A dreamer, this Ben Brasken. Not a student. Not a wise man. He read a lot, though. Most of his reading was simple stuff about heroes who were everything Ben Brasken was not. None of it was deep. What he read went in one eye and out the other. At any rate, he was kind of a dumb cluck.
Most of the time, he dreamed. He would stop and lean on his shovel and go off in reveries until somebody threw a chunk of coal at him. Ben Brasken was a fireman on the Benny Boston. The Benny Boston was a small tramp freighter, nearly as old as Ben Brasken, who was not a young man any more. It was a wonder the Benny Boston got by the inspectors.
Ben Brasken's dreams worried nobody but his employers, and didn't worry them much, because Ben Brasken wasn't worth worrying about. He was paid his not-very-good keep—a hammock in the creaking fo'c's'le, and a few of Uncle Sam's dollars each month, a very few.
Not that Ben Brasken was what is variously called a goop, a nut, bats in his belfry, or strange. Not a bit of it. Ben Brasken was just a poor failure of a sailor man who got his joy out of life by standing around, or going off in some corner where he was alone, and dreaming. They were light, harmless little dreams about Rolls Royces, penthouses, mints of money, and pretty girls. Just things he had seen in the movies.
An understanding of Ben Brasken, the kind of sailor man he was, is necessary to understand the fantastic things he started happening.
SOON after Ben Brasken shipped for his first voyage on the sea-going coffin, Benny Boston, he knew something was wrong.
The other sailors. They stood around in knots. When Ben Brasken, who was a sociable mouse in a quiet way, came up to them, they would stop talking and split up. They had a secret among them, and didn't want to share it.
Rough seas, a stinking tub of a ship, and hard work are wonderful ice-breakers where conversation is concerned, though. On the eleventh day out of San Francisco, destination New Guinea and other South Seas islands, a sailor told Ben Brasken what was what. The sailor had just polished off a pint he had smuggled aboard in San Francisco, but that was of no importance.
In truth, Ben Brasken did not give the story the credence he should have. He thought it was a little goofy.
"Say, what's the big secret around here?" Ben Brasken asked.
You see, his conversation was perfectly rational.
"Ah, it's somethin' most of us figure we saw on the last voyage," explained the sailor. "The skipper got mad and said he'd beach any sailor he caught talkin' about it. The skipper thinks he's got dignity. He don't want to get to be known as one of these captains who sight sea monsters.
"Everybody knows there ain't no sea monsters. Anybody who says he seen one is either a liar or tryin' to get his name in the papers, the skipper claims. See how it is? The old man don't want people to start laughin' at his boat."
Ben Brasken was naturally interested. "What did you see?"
The sailor squinted one eye and sucked his upper teeth. "I ain't sayin' we saw anythin'. It's what we thought we saw. It was a city."
"A city?"
"Yeah. It was at sea, at night. It was as dark as hell, and everybody knows you can't see anythin' when it is dark. But these buildin's in this city was there plain as could be. They showed up kinda like the stuff on the kind of watches you can tell time by in the dark."
"A mirage," said Ben Brasken.
"Huh?"
"A mirage. You see 'em in the deserts, and sometimes at sea."
"It was dark."
"Oh! Then it must have been phosphorescence in the water. You see a lot of that in the South Seas."
"This city was kinda up in the sky."
Ben Brasken scratched his head. He was baffled. "Where was this?"
"Two hundred miles off the New Guinea coast."
"That was kinda queer, wasn't it?" Ben Brasken said, after a minute. "How do you explain it?"
"Well, the skipper said it must be somebody on another boat throwin' a magic-lantern picture on a cloud. He said they use powerful magic lanterns and throw advertising pictures and stuff on clouds in New York and places like that."
"Of course!" exclaimed Ben Brasken. "That explains it."
The other snorted. "It don't explain how we all knew the name of the city was Ost."
"You what?"
"Everybody who saw the city knew it was called Ost. Don't ask me how. We can't figure it out. Yet somehow, every man knew it was Ost."
"That's funny."
"It get still funnier when you know there ain't no city named Ost."
"There ain't?"
"No, there ain't. We looked on all the charts."
Ben Brasken was not without a sense of humor. He did not believe in such spooky tales. He was sure fortune tellers were fakes, mediums were hoodoos, and anybody who believed in spiritualism was only kidding himself. So Ben Brasken burst out laughing.
"How'd you like a bust in the snoot?" growled the other, offended.
That put an end to it.
Until, of course, Ben Brasken disappeared at sea.
WHEN Ben Brasken was missed, and the cry, "Man overboard!" rang through the ancient Benny Boston, it was too late for there to be any hope.
Anyway, every one aboard was in something of a dither, because the glowing city in the sky had been seen again. The watch below, loitering on the murky foredeck, discovered it first.