"S. M. Stirling - Sea of Time 01 - Island in the Sea of Time 484" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

The other policeman's face went slack, then white. The moon
was a crescent a few days past new; and it ought to be right out
there now, getting ready to set. Instead it was nearly fullтАж
 "And the North Star should be just about there. T'ain't. Just
be glad nobody else's noticed yet," Cofflin said grimly. "Now let's
see if the phones to the mainland are working again."

Doreen Rosenthal looked at the image on her screen and
blinked again. One hand raised close-chewed nails toward her
mouth, and she forced it down with an effort of will. The other
twisted itself into her hair. She'd felt like weeping with relief
when that weirdтАж phenomenon. Let's not get emotional hereтАж
had gone away. Now she was feeling sick again, with a griping
pain below her breastbone.

"Let's look for the polestar," she said. One had to be
systematic. She split the screen and called up an exposure from
last night's .sequence beside the latest one for comparison. Her
fingers flew over the keyboard. "This doesn't make any sense at
all," she complained. Nothing was where it should be!

A thought struck her. Now you're going completely nuts, she
thought. Still, it couldn't hurt. It wouldn't take a minute to call
up the program and get the data fed.

More keystrokes. Nothing. Well, there's one crazy idea junked
. Lucky nobody would ever know she'd tried. Then she paused.
"Well, it can't hurt to be absolutely sure."

"SearchтАж forтАж allтАж correlations," she typed. Now the
program would run a back-and-forth search until it found a
stellar pattern corresponding to the one on the latest CCG
exposure.

Dawn was turning the eastern horizon pale pink before she
was sure.

Gevalt, she thought. It seemed appropriate. Tears trickled
down her face to drop and blotch on the keyboard.

This can't be happening to me! I'm an overweight Jewish
grad student from Hoboken, New Jersey! Things like this didn't
happen to anyone, and if they did it was to some blonde in a
movie, meeting Bruce Willis or something. Her arms hugged her
middle, feeling a cramping like a bad period.
 Mother, help! That calmed her a little. Mother would have
panicked even worse, if she had been here. "You're a scientist,
act like one," she chided herself, blowing her nose and wiping the
keyboard. "Let's firm this up and get a little precision here."