"Jack Williamson - After World's End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

The advertisement was pointed out to me by a friendly elevator operator at the Explorer's Club. Placed in the classified
columns of the New York Standard, for October 8, 1938, it ran:

WANTED: Vigorous man, with training and experience in scientific exploration, to undertake dangerous and unusual
assignment. Apply in person, this evening, 6 to 10. Dr. Hilaire Crosno, Hotel Crichton.

That sounded good. I had been in New York just twice too long. Always, when I had come back from the long
solitudes of desert or jungle, the first fortnight on Broadway was a promised paradise, and the second began to be
hell.

I gave the grinning boy a dollar, stuffed an envelope with credentials, downed another stiff peg of whiskey, and
walked into the glittering chromium lobby on the stroke of six. My inquiry for Dr. Crosno worked magic on the
supercilious clerk.

Crosno proved to be a big man, with huge bald head and deep-sunken, dark, magnetic eyes. The tension of his mouth
hinted of some hidden strain, and extreme pallor suggested that, physically, he was near the breaking point.

"Barry Horn?" His voice was deep and calm—yet somehow terrible with a haunting echo of panic. He was shuffling
through my references. "Qualifications seem sound enough. Your doctorate?"

"Honorary," I told him. "For a pyramid I dug out of the jungle in Quintana Roo." I glanced at the room's 109

110 After World's End

austere luxury, still trying to size him up. "Just what, Doctor, is your 'unusual assignment—?' "

Majestically, he ignored my question. Gray eyes studied me.

"You look physically fit, but there must be an examination." He checked a card in his hand. "You know something of
astronomy and navigation?"

"Once I sailed the hull of a smashed seaplane a thousand miles across the Indian Ocean."

The big head nodded, slowly.
"You could leave at once, for an—indefinite time?"

I said yes.

"Dependents?"

"I've a son, four years old." The bitterness must have shadowed my voice. "But he's not dependent on me. His mother
is dead, and her people convinced the courts that a footloose explorer wasn't the proper guardian for little Barry."

Dona Carridan was again before me, tall and proud and lovely. The one year I had known her, when she had
tempestuously left her wealthy family to go with me to Mesopotamia, had been the happiest of my life. Suddenly I was
trembling again with the terror of the plane crash in the desert; our son born in an Arab's tent; Dona, far from medical
aid, dying in agony....

"Then, Horn," Crosno was asking, "you're ready to cut loose from—everything?"