"Daniel Da Cruz - Mixed Doubles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Da Cruz Daniel)

disbelief as Prof. Dr. Dr. Thaddeus Klemper removed the padlock from the huge mover's crate that
occupied the opposite corner of the lab and trundled out a one-man helicopter, its blades folded back.
He quickly locked them into po-sition, stepped into the tiny open cockpit and fastened his seat belt, and
switched on the engine. While the main rotor windmilled, Klemper adjusted his helmet and gog-gles. He
gunned the engine. The craft rose into the air, canted forward, and curved up and across the trees in a
wide arc, heading east toward the valley where Sacra-mento would one day rise and nearby Sutter's
Creek, where nuggets of gold lay strewn on the sands, ripe for the plucking.
The tiny helicopter shrank, became a dust mote danc-ing on the horizon, and finally disappeared. Justin
Pope stood up and stretched his aching limbs. What had hap-pened was obvious enough if totally
incredible. He had heard about time travel but had never believed it was possible. Even now, with the
evidence before his eyes, he was inclined to suspect that he was the target of some monstrous practical
joke, the victim of a powerful hal-lucinogen injected into the airтАФthat purplish vapor perfectly fit the
billтАФwhich gave him the the illusion of traveling forwardтАФor was it backward?тАФthrough time.
Whichever it was, he was in another era, for sure. Of the campus and Berkeley there was no sign.
Oakland and San Francisco, he knew without looking, would have vanished as well. The contours of the
land around him seemed vaguely familiar, so if he had traveled in the three linear dimensions, it had not
been very far. But without question he had been transported to another time. The future, or the past?
Probably the past. Had it been the future, Dr. Klemper would have armed himself with more
sophisticated weap-ons than the Colt .45, which dated all the way back to the Philippine insurrection in
the early 1900s. Moreover, if they were in the distant past, as seemed likely, the noise and killing power
of the brace of pistols would suffice to put an army of Indians to flight.
Pope stepped out into the meadow that surrounded the laboratory, now standing roofless in the
sunshine. It was absolutely quiet. Well, not quiet, really. On the contrary, the air was seasoned with the
scents of summer, the humming of insects, the warble of birds, and the warm whis-per of the wind, the
lullaby of nature that all but blotted out the memory of the familiar noises of civilizationтАФ the rumble of
rush-hour traffic, the howl of distant si-rens, the amplified wail of rock music, the slamming of doors, the
inane chatter of nasal human voices. He was in another, saner world. It suddenly came to him that the
sounds around him blended to perfection with the tran-quil harmonies of Telemann, Haydn, Mozart, and
Schu-bert, redolent of a less complicated age. Pope's music, by contrast, filled with frenetic dissonance
and discord, reflected his own confused culture and perilous, war-threatened times. Were he to dwell in
a place like this, the music he wrote would be gentle and rhythmic, sweet and soothing.
He sighed.


On the crest of the hill he sat in the shade of a spread-ing black walnut that must have been five
centuries old, inhaling the fragrance of the wildflowers around him and surveying the vast solitude that
spread in all directions. Beyond the line of trees to the west lay the empty sea, while to the landward side
rose a light blue haze from purple valleys. Looking closer, he perceived a dark gray smudge filtering
through the blue.
Smoke! An Indian campfire, or perhaps the smoldering remains of a recent lightning strike. He longed
to inves-tigate, to be the first white man ever to set eyes on an American aborigine, but prudence held
him back. He had no idea where Klemper had gone, or why, or when he would return. One thing was
certain: he did not intend to be left behind when the good Prof. Dr. Dr. turned ahead the hands of time.
Justin Pope had scouted a fairly substantial area of the immediate vicinity of the time-transported
laboratory when he heard the distant drone of the returning helicop-ter. In the time it took the sun to
ascend to its zenith, he had found the remains of a number of campfires, some shards of broken pottery,
and the bones of freshly slaughtered game. He had also sampled wild fruit and berries that only faintly
resembled the modern varieties in size and taste, drunk from a spring of clear cold water he had
discovered on the hillside, seen dozens of rabbits, squirrels, quail, and deerтАФnone particularly alarmed
by his presenceтАФand briefly followed trails that crisscrossed the hillside, on which the prints of both