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

Samuelson's house turned out to be one of those tall, ornate, late-nineteenth century homes you
still see in small towns. Two stories and an attic with a wide screen porch in front and lilac
bushes growing aH along one side of it The rooms inside were small, dark and high-ccalinged, with
too much furniture for their flborspace. He had rigged a gas motor and a water tank to the well m
his basement that had formerly been run by an electric pump; and he had found an old, black, wood-
burning stove to block up in one corner of this spacious kitchen. The furniture was clean of dust
and in order.
He gave us the closest thing to a normal meal mat Fd eatenтАФor the girt had, undoubtedlyтАФsince the
time storm first hit Earth. I knew k had affected all the Barm, by mis time; not just the little
part west of the Great lakes in Norm America, where I was. I carried a good all-bands portable
radio along and, once in a whfle, picked up a fragment of a broadcast from somewhere. The
continuityтАФor discontinuityтАФUnes dividing the time areas usually blocked off radio. But sometimes
things came through. Hawaii, evidently, was unique in hardly having been touched, and Fd
occasionally heard bits of shortwave from as far away as Greece. Not that I listened much. There
was nothing I could do for me people broadcasting, any more man there was anything they could do
for me.
I told Samuelson about this whfle he was fixing dinner, and he said he had run into the same thing
with bom the shortwave and long-wave radios- he had set up. We agreed that the storm was not over.
"We've only had the one time change here in Saulsburg, though," he said. "Every so often, 111 ace
a line of change moving across country off on the horizon, or gta^fog still for a whfle out mere;
but so far, none's come this way."
"Where did all the people go, mat were in this placer I asked.
His face changed, all at once.
"I don't know," he said. Then he bent over the biscuit dough he was making, so mat his face was
hidden away from me. **! had to drive over to PeppardтАФthat*s the
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TIME STORM
next town. I drove and drove and couldn't find it. I began to think I was sick or crazy, so I
turned the car around and drove home. When I got back here, it was like you see it now."
It was dear he did not want to talk about it But 1 could guess some of what he had lost from the
house. It had been lived in by more than one adult, and several children. There were a woman's
overshoes in the front closet, toys in a box in one corner of the living room, and three bicycles
in good condition in the garage.
"What did you do for a living?" he asked me after a moment
"I was retired,** I said.
He frowned over that, too. So I told him about myself. The time storm had done nothing in my case
to leave me with things I did not want to talk about, except for the matter of Swannee, down in
Omaha; and somehow I was perfectly comforted and sure that she and that city had come through the
time storm changes unharmed, though I had heard no radio broadcasts from there.
MI started investing in the stock market when I was nineteen," I said, "before I was even out of
college, I struck it lucky." Luck, of course, had nothing to do with it; but I had found I could
not tell people that Because the word "stocks" was involved, it had to be hick, not hard research
and harder-headed decision-making, that hint made money for me. "Then I used what I had to take


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over a company that made trailers and snowmobiles; and that did all right I'd be there yet, but I
had a heart attack."