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

set up camp. It was so warm that I had the tent flaps tied all the way back. I lay there looking
out at the stars, seeming to move deeper and deeper hi the night sky, becoming more and more
important and making the earth under me feel more like a chip of matter lost in the universe.
But I could not sleep. That had happened to me a lot, lately. I wanted to get up and go sit
outside the tent by myself, with my back to the trunk of one of the cottonwoods. But if I did,
Sunday would get up and come out with me; and then the girl would get up and follow Sunday. It was
a chain reaction. A tag-end of a line from my previous two years of steady reading, during my
hermit-like existence above Ely, came back to me. Privatum comntoaum pubUco cettitтАФ"private
advantage yields to public.** I decided to lie there and tough it out
What I had to tough out was the replaying in my head of all the things that had happened. I had
almost forgotten, until now, my last summer in high school when I started teaching myself to read
Latin because I had just learned how powerfully it underlays all our English language. Underlays
and outdoes. "Bow long, O Cataline, will you abuse our patience?* Good, but not in the same ball
game with the thunder of old Cicero's original: "Quo usque, Catilina, abutere patienta nostra?"
After the sweep of the first time change that I thought waa my second heart attack come to take me
for good
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this timeтАФafter I had found I was not dead, or even hurtтАФthere had been the squirrel, frozen in
shock. The little gray body had been relaxed hi my hands when I picked it up; the small forepaws
had clung to my fingers. It had followed me after that for at least the first three days, when I
finally decided to walk south from my cabin and reach a city called Ely, that turned out to be no
longer there. I had not understood then that what I had done to the squirrel was what later I was
to do to Sunday тАФbe with h when it came out of shock, making it totally dependent on me * ...
Then, a week or so later, there had been the log cabin and the man in leggings, the transplanted
Viking or whoever, who I thought was just anyone cutting firewood with his shirt off, until he saw
me, hooked the axe over his shoulder as if holstering it, and started walking toward me....
I was into it again. I was really starting to replay tin whole sequence, whether I wanted to or
not; and I could not endure that, lying trapped in this tent with two other bodies. I had to get
out I got to my feet as quietly as I could. Sunday lifted bis head, but I hissed at bin between my
teeth so angrily that he lay down again. The girt only stirred in her sleep and made a little
noise in her throat, one hand flung out to touch the fur of Sunday's back.
So I made it outside without them after all, into the open air where I could breathe; and I sat
down with my back against the rugged, soft bark of one of the big cottonwoods. Overhead the sky
was perfectly dear and the stars were everywhere. The air was still and warm, very transparent and
dean. I leaned the back of my head against the tree trunk and let my mental machinery go. It was
simply something I was stuck withтАФhad always been stuck with, all my lifetime.
Well, perhaps not all Before the age of seven or eight tilings had been different But by the time
I was that old, I had begun to recognize that I was on my ownтАФand needed no one else.
My father had been a cipher as far back as I could remember. If someone were to tell me that he
had never actually realized he had two children, I would be inclined to believe it Certainly I had


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seen him forget us even when we were before his eyes, in the same room with him. He had been the
director of the Walter H. Mannheim private library in St Paul; and he was a harmless
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TIME STORM