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

that, when the waves came crashing into the docks, spray flying
higher than the roofs of the houses.

And always, there were the stars. The rooms below the
observatory held decades of observation, all stored in digital
form now. Endless fascination.

She took a bite out of a shrimp salad sandwich and frowned
as the computer screen flickered. Not another glitch! She leaned
forward, fingers unconsciously twisting a lock of her long black
hair. No, the digital CCD camera was running continuous
exposuresтАж

Stargazers didn't actually look at the stars through an
eyepiece anymore. It was ten minutes before she realized what
was happening in the sky.

Jared Cofflin sighed and leaned back in his office chair. There
really wasn't much for a police chief to do on Nantucket in the
winter. An occasional drunk-and-disorderly, maybe some kids
going on a joyride, now and then a domestic dispute; they'd gone
seven straight years without a homicide. But April came 'round
again, and pretty soon the summer people would be flooding in.
Summer was busy. Coofs were a rowdy lot. Not that the island
could do without them, although sometimes he very much
wished it could. Once it had been Nantucketers who traveled,
from Greenland to Tahiti.

With a wry grin, he thought of a slogan someone had
suggested to the Chamber of Commerce once as a joke: We used
to kill a lot of whales. Come to Nantucket!

The little police station was in a building that had once
housed the fire department, and across a narrow road from a
restaurant-cum-nightspot. The buildings on both sides were two
stories of gray shingle with white trim, like virtually everything
on the island that wasn't red brick with white trim. About time
for supper, he thought. No point in going home; he hadn't gotten
any better at serious cooking since Betty passed on five years
ago. Better to step over and get a burger.

He sighed, stood, hitched at his gunbelt, and reached for his
hat, looking around at the white-painted concrete blocks, the
boxes of documents piled in corners and bursting out of their
cardboard prisons. Hell of a life. And he'd had to let the belt out
another notch recently; it seemed unfair, when the rest of him
was the same lanky beanpole it'd been when he graduated from
high school back around LBJ's inauguration.

The lights flickered. Nantucket was just about to switch over