"Harry Harrison & Katherine MacLean - Web of the Norns" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

father had fits, too; they began after we were married. Such a sweet man. It runs in the family. They're
sensitive, you know."
He ignored the unhappy feeling the words gave him and told himself that everything she did was for
his good. She would take care of the jacket, too; she always fixed things so they came out the right way.
He stood up to return inside.
Then he saw it.

It was long and white and huge. It was like a giant bar or an elephant's tusk stretching across the sky
from horizon to horizon. One instant it was as far away as eternity; the next it was swooping down
towards him. He couldn't tell where that awareness came from, but he knew it was true. It was coming
directly towards him. It was like being on the tracks in front of an express train.
Before he could screamтАФbefore the thought that formed the scream was fully bornтАФit was too late.
It struck without impactтАФsoftly with a sudden sensation of tremendous motion.
The world vanished. In his eye he could see the after-image of the graveyard, the orange of the grass
and the red of the sky. The bright colours slowly faded and were replaced by nothing.
That was the only word that described the sensations he felt. At first his mind went out in an
expanding spiral of fear, then contracted back to something like sanity. He felt nothing, he heard nothing.
What he saw was puzzling until he realised it was no-colour. It was also not black. It was nearest to grey,
a grey fog of velvet that pressed in on him from all sides.
With a heart-stopping shock he realised that he wasn't breathing. But his heart couldn't stop, because
it wasn't beating. All the functions of his body were dead.
I am dead.
The thought had been scratching at the surface of his mind and now it gibbered its way in. His tightly
held thoughts collapsed and his mind screamed out in madness.
There was no measurement of time or duration, so Grant had no idea how long the period lasted. It
could have been years or seconds, but slowly it ebbed away. After the insanity came thoughts, but they
helped no more than the madness; he had no idea where he was nor what had happened.
After the thoughts came boredom, and this lasted for eternity.
His mind became like his body and he hung there in the unchanging grey fog, changeless himself, and
waited.

II

"Look now f Look what you've done. You've pulled one of the threads loose."
тАЬI neverтАФyou're the one who did it when you were screaming at me that the pattern was
wrong."
"Well the pattern is wrong . . ."
The argument continued and the second sister leaned forward to shout her opinion. The loose
thread blew in her face and in anger she shoved it back into the fabric.
She did not weave it back into the pattern but pushed it in at random and returned to the
argument.

Abruptly the greyness and silence was smashed by a screaming clamour and Grant found himself
falling through air that seemed thick with sound. A filthy board floor came up and smote him, and he lay
stunned for a moment amid the clamour of drunken howls, the smash of breaking bottles, the leathery
thud and grunt of blows meeting flesh. Yellow light flickered in his eyes and shadows surged above him,
snarling.
There was a crunching thud almost directly above him and a man with a short scraggly beard and
overlong hair tumbled heavily across Grant's legs. Blood began oozing from his ragged hair, and the
shape of his head looked horribly dented.