"Andre Norton - Ross Murdock 04 - Key Out Of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

with the star voyagers in the past of his own world. He had deliberately
seared his own flesh to break their mental control over him. Then the battle
had gone his way. But from it he had brought another scar--the unease of
that old terror when Ross Murdock, outlaw by the conventions of his own era,
Ross Murdock who considered himself exceedingly tough and made tougher yet
by training for Time Agent sorties, had come up against a power he did not
understand. Now he breathed deeply of the wind--the smell of the sea, the
scents of the land growths, strange but pleasant. So easy to relax, to drop
into the soft, lulling swing of this world in which they had found no fault,
no danger, no irritant. Yet, once those others had been here--the
blue-suited, hairless ones he called "Baldies." And what had happened then .
. . or afterward? A black head, brown shoulders, slender body, broke the
sleepy slip of the waves. A shimmering mask covered the face, flashing in
the sun. Two hands freed a chin curved yet firmly set, a mouth made more for
laughter than sternness, wide dark eyes. Karara Trehern of the Alii, once a
lineage of divine chieftains in Hawaii, was an exceedingly pretty girl.
But Ross regarded her aloofly, with coldness which bordered on hostility, as
she flipped her mask into its pocket on top of the gill-pack. Below his
rocky perch she came to a halt, her feet slightly apart in the sand. There
was an impish twist to her lips as she called:
"Why not come in? The water's fine."
"Perfect, like all the rest of this." Some of his impatience came out in the
sour tone. "No luck, as usual?"
"As usual," Karara conceded. "If there ever was a civilization here, it's
been gone so long we'll probably never find any traces. Why don't you just
pick out a good place to set up that time-probe and try it blind?"
Ross scowled. "Because"--his patience was exaggerated to the point of
insult--"we have only one peep-probe. Once it's set we can't tear it down
easily for transport somewhere else, so we want to be sure there's something
to look at beyond."
She began to wring the water out of her long hair. "Well, as far as we've
explored . . . nothing. Come yourself next time. Tino-rau and Taua aren't
particular; they like company."
Putting two fingers to her mouth, Karara whistled. Twin heads popped out of
the water, facing the shore and her. Projecting noses, mouths with upturned
corners so they curved in a lasting pleasant grin at the mammals on the
shore--the dolphin pair, mammals whose ancestors had chosen the sea,
whistled back in such close counterfeit of the girl's signal that they could
be an echo of her call. Years earlier their species' intelligence had
surprised, almost shocked, men. Experiments, training, co-operation, had
developed a tie which gave the water-limited race of mankind new eyes, ears,
minds, to see, evaluate, and report concerning an element in which the
bipeds were not free. Hand in hand with that co-operation had gone other
experiments. Just as the clumsy armored diving suits of the early twentieth
century had allowed man to begin penetration into a weird new world, so had
scuba equipment made him still freer in the sea. And now the gill-pack which
separated the needed oxygen from the water made even that lighter burden of
tanks obsolete. But there remained depths into which man could not descend
outside a submarine whose secrets were closed to him. There the dolphins
operated, in a partnership of minds, equal minds--though that last fact had