"Raymond Jones - Renegades of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Raymond)

causing some kind of regression. That seemed to make sense.
The jungle surroundings were like those he had seen many times
in the Army. Trees. Water. Mud. Humidity.

Not quite.

The differences were enough to tell him this scene was stirred
up by a damaged mind. In a moment, however, he would be all
right, he told himself.

It had been only a short time ago, not more than a couple of
hours at the, most, when he and Bill had their collision on the
campus of the College. It had been snowing after an ice storm.
Everybody was creeping along, half blind. Joe had been running
scornful of the hazards. It would have been all right if Bill
Bradley hadn't crept blindly into an intersection of the walks.

They collided. Their briefcases broke open and spilled books
and papers for a dozen feet over the snowbanks and walks. For
twenty minutes they scrabbled in fury to retrieve their
belongings. Papers that weren't their own they thrust at one
another in anger. Finally, with everything gathered up, they
retreated into the snowstorm in opposite directions without a
glance at the other.

The spilled contents included Joe's final paper for his
Kinematics of Machines class which would deter-mine his grade
and which was due tomorrow. He dried the soaked papers over
the floor vent of the heater in his room and recognized with a
sickness in his belly that four of the most critical sheets were
missing. And a half dozen of Bill Bradley's papers were still
mixed with his.

It would be impossible to duplicate the mathematical work on
the missing sheets that night, and there was no other copy of the
work. He had an impulse to rip the offending papers belonging
to Bill Bradley. But he needed them for ransom of his own sheets.

He didn't know how to locate Bill Bradley. The sheets
themselves gave no clue. What he read on them made no sense.
There were references to weird names such as Choral, Venata,
Susselein, and Tamarina. It looked as if Bill Bradley had been
writing fantasy stuff for an English assignment.

Joe remembered, however, seeing some reference to Bill
Bradley in connection with an obscure science fraternity, one of
those where the members speak only to each other. He located
the president, who told Joe that Bill lived with his aunt and uncle
at the old Huntington place nearly ten miles out of town. And he
had no phone.