"S. M. Stirling - Conquistador" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

slightly, like the surface of a body of water set on its side, staying there in
defiance of gravity.

No, not like water, he thought. It was too shiny; the overhead lights
he'd put in above the workbench had turned pale, as if there were some
diffuse internal glow from the surface of the whatever-it-was. It's not like
water. It's like a sheet of mercury standing on its side.

He could smell his own sweat, and it felt cold and clammy down his
flanks, and there was a liquid feeling south of his belly button, and his
testicles were trying to crawl up to meet it, but he was used to functioning
well while he ignored the physical sensations of fear. Once you got going,
you were too busy to notice it. His eyes flickered back and forth, trying to
catch details in something so strange that it slid away from the surface of
his mind. Then he noticed the shelves he'd put up for tools, and storage for
miscellaneous junk that his aunt Antonia had shipped out when he got out
of the hospital; stuff that had been around since his father died in '41, and
his mother moved in with her.

Now all he could see was the base; the upper nine-tenths of the shelving
had toppled out into the whatever-it-was. He took a stiff step forward,
then crouched and touched the rough wood; it felt completely normal, no
hotter or colder than it should be, texture the same. Carefully bracing his
foot against the flagstones of the cellar floor, he pulled on one section. It
stuck for a moment, then slid back into the room with him, leaving the
silvery nothingness undisturbed.

It was if he had pulled the shelf out of a mercury pond that neither wet
it nor rippled as the wood went through its surface. His fingers found no
damage, except where the backs of the shelves had splintered in a few
places as if they'd fallen against rocks. And there was dirt, a little, and bits
of grass and leaf caught in irregularities, and his hand darted out and
closed on an insect. A perfectly ordinary insect, a beetle of some sort. He
flicked it away, and it vanished through the silvery barrier.

"Well, I'll be damned," he whispered in the soft purring drawl of eastern
Virginia. "Ah will be eternally damned."

Swallowing, he extended his hand. There was a momentary coolness as
it slid through the surface, faint and fleeting, perhaps only his mind
expecting the shock of water. Then nothing except wind on his fingers,
which felt completely normal when he wiggled them, despite the arm
looking as if it ended where the silvery surface began. There was no
unusual sensation at all as he withdrew it, and wiggled the fingers again in
front of his face.
 Decision hardened. John Rolfe took a deep breath and leaned forward.
For a moment he was dazzled, but that was only because the setting sun
shone into his eyes. He gasped at that, and then again as he looked down,
seeing his own head and shoulders emerging from a flat expanse of
ever-so-slightly rippling silver. Because what he saw was certainly not his