The Greatest Sci-Fi Classics. Эдгар Аллан По

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СКАЧАТЬ I rubbed my eyes. The Time Machine had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the laboratory was empty. A pane of the skylight had, apparently, just been blown in.

      I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that something strange had happened, and for the moment could not distinguish what the strange thing might be. As I stood staring, the door into the garden opened, and the manservant appeared.

      We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come. ‘Has Mr. — — gone out that way?’ said I.

      ‘No, sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find him here.’

      At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.

      Epilogue

      One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now — if I may use the phrase — be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did he go forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know — for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made — thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank — is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers — shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle — to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

The War of The Worlds

       Table of Contents

       Book One. The Coming of the Martians

       Chapter One. The Eve of the War

       Chapter Two. The Falling Star

       Chapter Three. On Horsell Common

       Chapter Four. The Cylinder Opens

       Chapter Five. The HeatRay

       Chapter Six. The HeatRay in the Chobham Road

       Chapter Seven. How I Reached Home

       Chapter Eight. Friday Night

       Chapter Nine. The Fighting Begins

       Chapter Ten. In the Storm

       Chapter Eleven. At the Window

       Chapter Twelve. What I Saw of the Destruction

       Chapter Thirteen. How I Fell in with the Curate

       Chapter Fourteen. In London

       Chapter Fifteen. What Had Happened in Surrey

       Chapter Sixteen. The Exodus from London

       Chapter Seventeen. The “Thunder Child”

       Book Two. The Earth Under the Martians

       Chapter One. Under Foot

       Chapter Two. What We Saw from the Ruined House

       Chapter Three. The Days of Imprisonment

       Chapter Four. The Death of the Curate

       Chapter Five. The Stillness

       Chapter Six. The Work of Fifteen Days

       Chapter Seven. The Man on Putney Hill

       Chapter Eight. Dead London

       Chapter Nine. Wreckage

       Chapter Ten. The Epilogue

      Book One.

       The Coming of the Martians

       Table of Contents

      Chapter One.

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