"Philip Jose Farmer - The Gate of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

torn flesh, sheared bone, and spurting blood.
Two Hawks turned the Hiawatha east but, before the maneuver was completed, the ship was
struck again in several places. Somebody in the aft was screaming so loudly that he could be heard
even above the cacophony outside and the air shrilling through the holes in the skin of the craft.
Two Hawks pulled the Hiawatha up at as steep an angle as he dared. Even though he had to go
through the fiery lacework ahead, he had to get altitude. With his two port engines on fire and the
propeller of the outermost starboard engine blown off, he could not stay airborne much longer. Get
as high as possible and then jump.
He had an odd feeling, one of dissociation. It lasted for only two seconds, then it was gone, but
during that time he knew that something alien, something unearthly, had occurred. What was
peculiar was the sensation that the dissociation was not just subjective; he was convinced that the
ship itself and all it contained had been wrenched out of the context of normalityтАФor of reality.
Then he forgot the feeling. The spiderweb of tracers and stars of flak parted for a moment, and
he was above it and through it. The roar and crump of the exploding shells were gone; only the
wind whistling through the hole in the shield could be heard.
From nowhere, a fighter plane appeared. It came so swiftly, as if out of a trapdoor in the sky,
that he had no time to identify it. It flashed by like black lightning, its cannon and machine guns
spitting. The two craft were so close that they could not avoid each other; the German flipped one
wing and dived to get away. The ship staggered again, this time struck its death blow. The left wing
was sheared off; it floated away with the right wing of the German fighter.
A moment later, Two Hawks was free of the Hiawatha. The ground was so close that he did not
wait the specified time to pull the ripcord but did so as soon as he thought he was free of the plane.
He fell without turning over, and he saw that the city of Ploesti, as he knew it, was no longer there.
Instead of the suburbs that had been below him, there were dirt roads, trees, and farms. Ploesti itself
was so far away that it was nothing but a pillar of smoke.
Below him, the Hiawatha, now a globe of flame, was falling. The German craft was turning over
and over; a hundred yards away from it and a hundred feet above it, the parachute of the flier was
unfolding, billowing out. Then his own chute had opened, and the shock of its grip on the air had
seized him.
To his left; another man was swinging below his semi-balloon of silk. Two Hawks recognized
the features of Pat OтАЩBrien, the topturret gunner. Only two had escaped from the Hiawatha.
 2
The snap of the parachute, opening like a sail to catch the wind, made the straps cut into Two
Hawks legs. Something popped in his neck, but there was no pain. If anything, he thought briefly,
the jerk and the popping of vertebrae had probably been more like an osteopathic treatment and had
released tension in his body and straightened out his skeleton.
Then he was examining the terrain swelling below him, the details getting larger but the field of
view getting smaller. His chute had opened only two hundred feet above the ground, so he did not
have much time for study and very little time to get set for the drop.
The wind was carrying him at an estimated six miles an hour over a solid growth of trees. By the
time he came to earth, he would be past it and in a field of cut wheat. Beyond the wheat field was a
narrow dirt road running at right angles to him. Trees grew along the road, beyond which was a
thatch-roofed cottage, a barnyard, and several small barns. Past the house was a garden surrounded
by a log fence. Back of the garden, the trees grew in a single dense file a quarter of a mile wide. An
opening in the trees permitted him to glimpse the darkness of a shadowy creek.
He came down closer to the trees than he had thought he would because there was an
unexpected lull in the wind. His feet brushed the top of a tree on the edge of the woods, then he was
on the ground and rolling. Immediately, he was up on his feet and going through the required
procedure for disentangling himself. The trees stopped whatever wind there might be; the chute had
collapsed on the ground.