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

still a "coof," of course, or "from away," to use a less
old-fashioned term. Everybody whose ancestors hadn't arrived
in the seventeenth century was a coof, to the core of old-time
inhabitants, a "wash-ashore" even if he'd lived here for years.
This was the sort of place where they talked about "going to
America" when they took the ferry to the mainland.

He trudged past Easy Street, which wasn't, and turned onto
Broad, which wasn't either, up to the whaling magnate's
mansion that he stayed in every year. It had been converted to an
inn back in the 1850s, when the magnate's wife insisted on
moving to Boston for the social life. Few buildings downtown
were much more recent than that. The collapse of the whaling
industry during the Civil War era had frozen Nantucket in time,
down to the huge American elms along Main Street and the
cobblestone alleys. The British travel writer Jan Morris had
called it the most beautiful small town in the world, mellow brick
and shingle in Federal or neoclassical style. A ferociously
restrictive building code kept it that way, a place where
Longfellow and Whittier would have felt at home and Melville
would have taken a few minutes to notice the differences.

Mind you, it probably smells a lot better these days. Must
have reeked something fierce when the harborfront was lined
with whale-oil renderies. It had its own memories for him, now.
Still painful, but life was like that. People died, marriages too,
and you went on.

He hurried up Broad Street and hefted his bags up the brick
stairs to the white neoclassical doors with their overhead
fanlights flanked by white wooden pillars. The desk was just
within, but the tantalizing smells came from downstairs. The
whalers were long gone, but they still served a mean seafood
dinner in the basement restaurant at the John Cofflin House.

Doreen Rosenthal pecked at her computer and sneezed; there
was a dry tickle in her throat she was dolorously certain was
another spring cold. Behind her the motors whined, turning the
telescope toward the sky. It wasn't a very big reflector, just above
the amateur level, but it was an instrument of sorts, and you
could massage information out of the results. Sort of like 0.01
percent of Mount Palo-mar. Astronomy posts weren't that easy
to find for student interns, and the Margaret Milson Association
had given her this one. It meant living on Nantucket, but that
wasn't so bad; she was the quiet sort even at U. Mass. She'd
finally managed to lose some weight, having nothing better to do
with her spare time than exercise. Well, a little weight, and it's
going to be more. Even in winter, the island was a good place to
bike, or you could find somewhere private to do kata. When it
wasn't storming, of course; and there was a wild excitement to