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

the town?"
"Yes," be said. He was frowning. "Did you say your wife was mere?"
"Yes," I answered. For the life of me, I had meant to say "ex-wife," but my tongue had slipped;
and it was not worm straightening the matter out now for someone Hke Samuelson.
"Look," he said, "you don't have to go right away. Stop and have dinner.**
Stop and have dinner. Something about my mentioning ft wife had triggered off a hospitality reflex
in him. The famuiar, homely words he spoke seemed as strange and out of place, here between the
empty town and the haze that barred the landscape to our right, as the wrecked gadget at our feet.
"AH right," I said.
W┬╗ went back, over the barricade and down to the panel truck. I called to the leopard and the girl
to come out, and introduced them to Samuelson. His eyes widened at the sight of the leopard; but
they opened even more at the sight of the gui behind the big cat-
12
TIME STORM
"I caU the leopard 'Sunday/ ** I said. "Hie guTs never told me her name."
I put out my band and Sunday stepped forward, flattening his ears and nibbing his head up under my
palm with a sound that was like a whimper of pleasure.
**I came across him just after a time change had swept die area where he was," I said. "He was
still in shock when I first touched him; and now I've got his soul in pawn, or something like
that. You've seen how animals act, if you get them right after a change, before they come all the
way back to being themselves?"
Samuefeon shook his head. He was looking at me now with some distrust and suspicion.
"That*s too bad," I said. "Maybe you'll take my word for it, then. He's perfectly safe as long as
I'm around."
I petted Sunday. Samuelson looked at the girl.
"Hello," he said, smiling at her. But she simply stared back without answering. She would do
anything I set her to doing, but I had never been able to make her seem conscious of herself. The


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straight, dark hair hanging down around her shoulders always had a wild look; and even the shirt
and jeans she was wearing looked as if they did not belong on her.
They were the best of available choices, though, I had put her into a dress once, shortly after I
had found her; and the effect had been pitiful. She had looked like a caricature of a young girl
in that dress.
"She doesn't talk," I said. MI came across her a couple of days after I found the leopard, about
two hundred miles south. The leopard was about where the Minneapo-fis-St Paul area used to be. It
could have come from a zoo. The girl was just wandering along the road. No telling where she came
from."
"Poor kid," said Samuelson. He evidently meant it; and I began to think it even more unlikely that
he would shoot me in (he back.
We went to bis house, one block off Main Street, for dinner.
"What about theтАФwhatever-you-can-them?" I asked. "What if one comes while you aren't there to stop
it?"
The buzzers," he said. "No, Hke I told you, they don't run on schedule, but after one's come by,
if s at least six and a half hours before the next one. It's my guess there's
HMB STORM 13
* some kind of automatic factory behind the mist mere, mat takes mat kmg to make a new one."