"Philip Jose Farmer - Time' s Last Gift" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

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Philip Jose Farmer - Time's Last Gift (1972)

(Scanned by: Kislany)

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One

The explosion was as loud as a 75-millimeter cannon's.

At one second, there had been nothing but dead wet grass and limestone rocks on the edge
of the steep hill. A gray torpedo shape appeared as if precipitated by some invisible chemical in
the air. The displacement of air caused the boom that rattled down the hillside and the valley and
across the distant river and bounced back to the vehicle.

The H. G. Wells I, without moving a micron in space, had traveled from A.D. 2070, Spring,
to circa 12,000 B.C., Spring. Immediately after making the long leap in time, it moved in space.
The vehicle had appeared two feet in the air and on the lip of the hill. It fell with a crash to
the ground and began rolling.

Forty feet long, its hull of irradiated plastic, it did not suffer from the very steep
three-hundred-foot descent. It was not even scratched, though it broke off sharp projections of
lime-stone, and eventually stopped upright at the bottom of the hill after snapping off a score of
dwarf pines.

'That was better than the fun-house,' Rachel Silverstein said in a quivering voice. She
smiled, but her skin was almost as pale as her teeth.

Drummond Silverstein, her husband, grunted. His eyes were wide, and his skin was gray. But
the blood was returning swiftly.

Robert von Billmann spoke with a very slight trace of German accent.

'I presume it is safe to unstrap ourselves?'

John Gribardsun twisted some dials on the instrument board before him. A slight whirring
told of the projection of a TV camera. The view changed from a blue sky with some high white
clouds to dead wet grass ahead and, a mile away, the river at the bottom of the valley.

He turned another dial, and the view switched to the hill down which they had rolled.
Halfway up, a fox-like animal jumped out from behind a rock.

The camera swiveled. On the other side of the valley was another animal. Gribardsun turned
the closeup dial.

'A hyena,' Gribardsun said. His voice was deep and authoritative. 'A cave hyena. Looks
like a Kenyan hyena except it's much larger and all gray.'