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

A sailor ran to get the skipper, whose name was Captain Smooth, a name, incidentally, which did not fit him.
The sailor met Ben Brasken in a companionway, and shouted, "We're seein' that thing again!"
"I know it," Ben Brasken replied. "I am on my way there now."
That was the last they saw of Ben Brasken on that voyage. A rain squall hit the old steamer a few minutes later, and while a rain squall is nothing to a good ocean freighter, when one blew down on the Benny Boston, things had to be watched. All hands were busy for a while, and they stopped seeing the city.
They missed Ben Brasken. They searched the fo'c's'le, the other places where he might logically be, and didn't find him.
The sailor who had met Ben Brasken on the companion got to thinking.
"He said he was on his way there," the seaman muttered. "Holy ladders! I wonder if he meant he was on his way to that city? I thought he meant he was headed for the deck to have a look."
Captain Smooth ordered the Benny Boston hove to. They laid there the rest of the night, the vessel rolling, and some of the men became seasick. Yes, sailors get seasick.
The day dawned bright and clear. There was no city in sight. There was just a lot of ocean.
They did not find poor Ben Brasken.
They sailed on to Melbourne, Australia, which was as far as they went. In Melbourne, the story got out, and the newspapers ate it up. Captain Smooth got a cable from his owners telling him to cut out such idiocy.
When they returned to San Francisco, some enterprising reporters got the first mate tight, and the front pages carried his remarks.
Captain Smooth was carpeted, the Benny Boston got a new first mate, and became an old-fashioned hell-ship on the leg back to Melbourne. It helped a little when they didn't see the strange city.
But they saw the city when three hundred miles off the New Guinea coast, enroute back to San Francisco.
And they found Ben Brasken climbing aboard the Benny Boston in the open sea, carrying an iron block.
BEN BRASKEN hauled himself over the rail, and stood, clothes leaking water, holding his piece of iron. The rope up which he had climbed was a line which trailed overside and down into the water.
The first two sailors to see Ben Brasken lit out running, reached the fo'c's'le, and didn't say a word. They thought they had seen a ghost.
And why not? Ben Brasken had vanished quite some time ago in the open sea, and here he was climbing aboard again! On the face of the thing, it was absolutely impossible.
Captain Smooth, when Ben Brasken was brought before him, took three fingers of rum in a water glass, although he was not a drinking man. Before he said a word, Captain Smooth looked for a long time at the sailor who had done the impossible.
A different Ben Brasken stood before him, yet it was the same man, or a shadow of the same man.
Ben Brasken was emaciated, so thin that the shape of his teeth actually showed under his cheeks and lips when his mouth was closed. His eyes were burning coals.
Water ran off him and made a pool on the old rug in the captain's cabin.
Captain Smooth looked at Ben Brasken's piece of iron.
The piece of iron was less than a foot long, less than half that wide, a little less thick than it was wide, and had a kind of handle fastened to one flat side. The other flat side was smooth.
In general, it was rather like an oversize flatiron of the old-fashioned kind that had to be heated on the cookstove. Except that it had squarish ends.
When Captain Smooth got a voice, he pointed at the iron and asked, "What's that?"
"An ordinary piece of iron," Ben Brasken replied hollowly. "But it was touched with the magic of the mighty Goa, and so with this key I was able to walk through the mouth of the cave into Ost."
Captain Smooth swallowed two or three times and squinted at Ben Brasken.
"Where have you been?" he asked.
"Ost," Ben Brasken said. "I just told you."
"How did you get there?"
"I swam."
"How did you get back?"
"I swam."
"What did you find there, Ben Brasken?"
Ben Brasken shut his eyes and seemed to be thinking.
"I believe," he said grimly, "the main thing I found was the awful terror."
CAPTAIN SMOOTH sat back, relaxed, and tried to look as gentle as he could. He was suddenly convinced that he was dealing with a demented man.
"What is Ost?" Captain Smooth asked quietly. "We'd like to know all about your experiences, Ben. Is Ost a town on one of the Japanese islands?"
"No," Ben Brasken replied quickly, "Ost is the city of the Ostians. The Japs probably never heard of it. You never heard of it either, did you?"
"I—I think I saw it in the sky," Captain Smooth said. "It was kind of a glowing color."
"The buildings were shaped like pyramids?" Ben Brasken asked. "And one of them, the temple of Goa the mighty, was upside down?"
Captain Smooth gulped. As a matter of fact, one of the queer aspects of the city in the sky had been the apparent upside-down position of one huge building.
The city, as he and the crew had observed it, had been somewhat vague as to outline, and the exact details of the structures did not stand out any too clearly.
"What was this horror you mentioned?" Captain Smooth asked.
Ben Brasken seemed to think again.
"It was so terrible," he said at last, "that you had better give me time to think of a way to describe it so you will understand,"
"That's all right, Ben," Captain Smooth said quickly. "Take your time. What else did you see?"
"I saw Martin Space."
"Oh, then the people in Ost are white people, eh?"