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

too real to ignore. I knew that I must go. I went back to Crosno, waiting beside the rocket, and told him my decision.
But something caught my throat as I asked him, "When?"

Venus was overhauling Earth in its orbit, he said, approaching inferior conjunction. His calculations were based on a
start at three the next Sunday morning.

"Four days," he said. "Can you be ready?"

I said I could. And there was oddly little to do. I packed and stored a few possessions, called on my attorney, and then
went back to study the controls and mechanism of the rocket.

The greatest danger, Crosno said, would be from the Cosmic Rays. They would penetrate the rocket. He made me take
a drug to guard against them.
"It was compounded for me by a great radiologist," he told me. "A modification of the Petrie formula. The base of it is a
new uranium salt that seems less poisonous than most. We're trying to neutralize the effects of one type of radiation
with those of another."

The stuff was a greenish liquid. He injected it into my arm, twice daily. The only apparent effect was a feverish
restlessness. I was unable to sleep, despite a mounting, crushing fatigue.

On the last night, when all was tested and ready, Crosno sent me up to my room. But the torture of that insomnia drove
me to slip out of the house. I walked for many hours across the slumbering countryside. The world slept beneath a
gibbous moon. Far off, a train rumbled and whistled. A dog barked in the distance. The air was spiced with autumn. A
slow dull regret rose in me that I must leave all this—all the Earth.

I thought of Dona, dead. Suddenly my bitterness toward her people seemed a childish, petulant thing. I wanted to
make peace with them. For Dona's sake, and

114 After World's End

little Barry's. I wanted to find a telephone, and call them, and talk to little Barry.

But it was long past midnight—too late to wake the child. I recalled that strange dream, hallucination, whatever it was,
of Dona in the crystal box. And a sudden breathless eagerness turned me back to Crosno's place. He was waiting
about the rocket, alarmed by my absence.

"I couldn't sleep," I told him. "That damned drug—"

"I was afraid—" he said anxiously. "You've just ten minutes."

I climbed the spidery ladder, pulled myself through the small round man-hole into the cramped tiny control room, and
screwed the airtight plate into position behind me. Outside, Crosno dived into a sand-bagged shelter.

Trying to forget that I was sitting on enough high explosive to blow me to kingdom come, I kept my eyes on an
illuminated chronometer. My hands were cold and trembling on the three levers connected to the three rocket motors.
At last the needle touched the hour, and I pulled the firing levers.

The sound was the shriek of a million typhoons. The rocket drove upward like a giant sledge. I could see the hurricane
of fire spread blue against the dark ground. It covered Crosno's shelter.