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

Samuelson's eyebrows went up.
"A heart attackr he said. "You're pretty young for something like that."
"I was damned young," I said. "I was twenty-four.**
I discovered suddenly that I had been wrong about not having things I did not want to talk about I
did not want to tell him about my heart attack. He looked too much tike a man who'd never had a
sick day in his life.
"Anyway," I said, "my doctor told me to take H easy and lose weight That was two yean ago. So I
sold out, set up a trust to support me, and bought a place up in the woods of northern Minnesota,
beyond ElyтАФif you know fhet state. I got back in shape, and I've been fine ever since; until the
time storm hit three weeks ago."
TIME STORM
15
T "Yes," he said.
The food was ready, so I helped him carry it into the dining room and we all ate there; even
Sunday, curled up in a corner. I had thought Samuelson might object to my bringing the leopard
into his house, but he had not
Afterwards, we sat on his screened porch at the front of the house, with the thick leaves of tile
sugar maple in the yard screening us from the western sun. It was after six by my watch, but now
in midsummer, there were at least another three hours of light left Samuelson had some homemade
white wine which was not bad. It was not very good either, but the town was apparently a dry town;
and of course, he had not left it since he had first come back here and found his people gone.
"How about the girl?" he asked me, when he first poured the wine into water glasses.
"Why notr I said. "We may be aU deadтАФher included тАФtomorrow, if the wrong sort of time change
catches us."
So he gave her a glass. But she only took a small sip, then put it down on the floor of the porch
by her chair. After a bit while Samuelson and I talked, she got out of the chair itself and sat
down on the floor where she could put an arm around Sunday, who was lying there, dozing. Outside
of raising a lazy eyebrow when he fett the weight of her arm, the leopard paid no attention. It
was amazing what he would stand from her, sometimes.
"What is itr Samuelson asked me, after we'd been talking for a while about how things used to be.
"I meanтАФwhere did it come from?**
He was talking about the time storm.
"I dont know," I said. "FH bet nobody does. But Fve got a theory."
"What*s that?" He was looking at me closely in the shadow of the porch. A little evening breeze
stirred the lilac bushes into scraping their upper branches against the side of the house.
"I think it*s just what we're calling ft," I said. "A storm. Some sort of storm in space that the
whole world ran into, the same way you could be out driving in your car and run into a
thunderstorm. Only in this case, instead of wind and rain, thunder and lightning, we get these
time changes, like ripples moving across the surface of tile world, with everything getting moved
either forward or back in time. Wherever a change passes over them."
16
TIME STORM
**How about here?" he asked. "The town's just where tt was before. Only the people ..."
He trailed off.
"How do you know?" I said. "Maybe the area right around here was moved forward just a year, say,
or even a month. That wouldn't be enough to make any change in the buildings and streets you could
notice, but it might have been beyond the point where everybody living here, for some reason,
decided to get out"
"WhyT
"Those buzzers, as you call them," I said. "Seeing one of them come at the town would be pretty