"Gordon R. Dickson - Time Storm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

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TIME STORM
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and
any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright ┬й 1977 by Gordon R. Dickson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Book
Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, N.Y. 10471
ISBN; 0-671-72148-8
Cover art by Gary Ruddell
First Baen printing, December 1992
Distributed by SIMON & SCHUSTER
1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10020
Printed in the United States of America
DEDICATION: TO THE UBKARIANB
Daring the 1930s and 1940s anyone writing science fiction did so almost exclusively for magazines.
Then in the early 1950s the magazine market began to die and paperback books took over. But the
paperback books were on the stand one week and gone the next By the time an author's newest book
came out his older books had disappeared.
As a result, during these later years, when the magazines were mostly gone and the paperback books
were coining and going, there were only a few of us who could afford to be fuD-thne writers of
science fiction; and the fact that this was possible at an was only because libraries continued to
be the only real market for hardcover science fiction. The libraries alone bought science fiction
books on a regular basis, shelved mem, and made them continuously available to readers; and in
this way libraries kept both science fiction and those of us who wrote it, alive.
To librarians everywhere, therefore, this bookтАФthe youngest of my literary children to see use
tight of dayтАФIs dedicated.
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The leopardтАФI called him Sunday, after the day I found himтАФalmost never became annoyed with the
girl, for all her hanging on to him. But he was only a wild animal, after all, and there were
Hants to his patience.
What had moved me to pick up first him, then her, was something I asked myself often without
getting a good answer. They were nothing but encumbrances and no concern of mine. My only concern
was getting to Omaha and Swannee. Beyond that point there was no need for me to think. But ... I
don't know. Somehow out of the terrible feeling of emptiness that I kept waking up to in the
mornings, I had gotten a notion that *n a world where nearly all the people and animals had
vanished, they would be living creatures I could talk to. Talk to," however, had turned out to be
the working phrase; because certainly neither of them was able to talk back. Crazy cat and
speechless girl and with them, myself, who before had always had the good sense never to need
anybody, dragging them both along with me across a landscape as mixed up and insane as they were.
But, of course, without me they would have bean helpless.
This time, the trouble erupted just as I pushed the panel truck over a rise in late summer wheat
country, which I figured had once been comland, a little below the one-time northern border of
Iowa. AH the warning I heard was a sort of combination meow-snarl. Not a top-pitch, ready-to-fight
sound, but a plain signal that Sunday bad had enough of being treated tike a stuffed animal and
wanted the girl to leave him alone. I braked the panel sharply to a stop on the side of the empty,
two-lane asphalt road and scrambled over the seat backs into the body of the truck.
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