"Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 08 - The Chantry Guild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

three years of idleness. Almost in the same moment as she gripped the control rod, the ship burst from
the hillock, sending an explosion of earth, grass and trees in all directions. On ordinary atmosphere drive
she lifted and hedgehopped over the nearest ridge. As soon as she knew she was out of her pursuers'
sight, she phase-shifted the craft clear of the planet in one jump. Her next shift was almost immediate, to
two light-years beyond the sun just now rising, which was the star called Beta Procyon by those on Old
Earth.

Out at last in interstellar space, she was beyond pursuit and discovery by any ship of the Younger
Worlds. Here in deep space, she was as unfindable as a minnow in a world-wide Ocean.

She glanced around the unkempt interior of the vessel. It was hardly in condition for a formal visit to Old
Earth, let alone to the Final Encyclopedia. But that was beside the point. What mattered was that she had
got away safely past whatever ships had been on guard patrol around the Worlds under Beta Procyon.
Ahead of her still lay the greater task, the matter of reaching Old Earth itself-, which would mean running
the gauntlet of the Younger Worlds' fleet besieging that world. Somehow she must slip safely through a
thick cordon of much better armed and ready battleships, to which her own small vessel would indeed be
a minnow by comparison.

But that was a problem to be dealt with when she came to it.

CHAPTER

2

Through the library window, the cold mountain rain of early winter in the north temperate zone of Old
Earth could be seen slanting down on the leafless oaks and the pines around the little lake before the
estate building that was the earliest home he could remember, as Hal Mayne. Overhead, obscuring the
peaks of the surrounding mountains, the sky was an unbroken, heavy, gray ceiling of clouds; and the
gusts from time to time slanted the rain at a greater angle, and made the treetops bow momentarily. The
darkness of the day and the lowering clouds made the window slightly reflective; so that he saw what
was barely recognizable as an image of his face, looking back at him like the face of a ghost.

An unusually early winter had commenced upon the Rocky Mountains of the North American continent.
An early winter, in fact, was upon the whole northern hemisphere of the planet. Outside, the day was chill
and dismal, sending forest creatures to their dens and holes. Within the library a fire burned brightly in the
fireplace, with the good smell of birch wood, started by the automatic machinery of the house on a signal
from a satellite overhead. The ceiling lighting was bright on the spines of the antique books that solidly
filled the shelves of the bookcases covering all the walls of the room.

This was the home where the orphan Hal had been raised by his tutors, the three old men he had
loved-and the place where he had watched those three killed when he had been sixteen eleven years ago.
It was an empty house now, as it had been ever since; but usually he could find comfort here.

They're not dead, he reminded himself. No one you love ever dies-for you. They go on in you as long as
you live. But the thought did not help.

On this cold, dark day he felt the emptiness of the house inescapably around him. His mind reached out
for consolation, as it had on so many such occasions, to remembered poetry. But the only lines of verse
that came to him now did not comfort * They were no more than an echo of the dying year outside.
They were the lines of a poem he had himself once written, here in this house, on just such a day of