"E. C. Tubb - Dumarest 32 - The Return" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tubb E. C)

Brooklyn, N.Y. 11228-0209 USA

Introduction to The Return by E.C. Tubb

In a way it all started back in 1957 when I wrote a short story,
The Bells of Acheron , which dealt with a party of tourists
visiting a selection of worlds with unusual features. That of
Acheron was a deep, spacious valley filled with a mass of growths
each of varying size and all bearing a host of seed pods ranging
in size from small to enormous. The soil was loaded with silicon,
the pods were of glass and, at dawn and dusk when gentle winds
stirred the valley each pod responded to the impact of the seeds
it contained. The result was music which covered the entire
aural spectrum, 'white noise' which held every sound ever heard
and which could be shaped by the mind to form words, prayers,
songs, pleas — a threnody born in the subconscious and holding
a subtle attraction and a deadly threat.

A story, published, later anthologized, but relegated to the
stature of 'ghost' — a thing done and set aside in the face of other
work.

Ten years later that ghost rose again — and it was not alone.

When Earl Dumarest rose from the casket in which he'd lain
doped, frozen and ninety percent dead, he couldn't have known
what he had started, and neither did I. I was writing an
adventure novel and had created a character who would play a
prominent part. I had no suspicion, then, that we would travel
together in 32 books over the next eighteen years.
 Like any strong character, Dumarest quickly developed a life
of his own. To be believable he had to be consistent in the way he
thought, behaved and evaluated data. The things which made
him, the attributes he had been given, the motives which drove
him, dictated the actions he took and his response to events in
which he became embroiled.

Much was made clear at the very beginning. Dumarest had
ridden as he had, a Low passage, risking the fifteen percent
death rate, for the sake of cheap travel. A traveler at the bottom
of the heap to whom poverty, while a perpetual danger, was no
stranger. An unexpected diversion had dumped him on the last
kind of world he had wanted to visit. Gath, a tourist attraction,
with a soaring range of mountains fretted, worn, shaped,
channeled, pierced and funneled into the resemblance of a
monstrous organ which, like the plants of Acheron, when
impacted by the wind, filled, the air with a mind-churning
medley of 'white noise'. But on Gath the storms were violent, the
sounds they produced strong enough to induce insanity and