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

formality. So did the fact that there were only twenty-five officers
on the force.

"Some of our own people are a mite shaky, Chief."

"Ayup. Don't blame 'em, George. Still, we've got a job to do."
He stopped to think for a moment, running through a list of
names in his head. "Get everyone who's off-duty back on. And
call Ed Geary, Dave Smith, Johnnie Scott, and Sean Mahoney.
Tell them to each pick six friends they can trust and come down
to the station. Deputize 'em."

George missed a step. "Chief, we can't do that on our own
say-so!"

"I can and I just did," Cofflin said. "Ed's a good man and he
knows an emergency when he sees one, and so are the rest. You
call them and get them posted. Meanwhile, let's see if I can talk
some sense into these people here." The selectmen or somebody
should be doing it; he was a policeman, not a politician. But they
were probably out there running around with the rest of the
crowd.
 He mounted the steps of the bank at the head of Main Street
and looked down the cobbles toward the big planter at the foot of
the street. The lights on the cast-iron lampposts shone on a sea
of faces, on a street that should be mostly clear this time of
night. Overhead the ghastly, garish lights still crawled and
sparked, adding a weird touch to the upturned faces; all it
needed was torches and pitchforks to be something out of a
movie. He raised a battery-powered megaphone to his lips.

"Now, let's have some sense here," he said.

"What the fuck's going on?" someone yelled, and the crowd
roared with him.

"QUIET, DAMMIT!"

The bullhorn cut through the gathering madness, stopped it
feeding on itself.

"If I knew what was going on, I'd tell you," Cofflin said bluntly,
in the silence that followed. "I can tell you going hog-wild won't
help any. ThatтАФ" he pointed upward toward the shimmering
dome of lightтАФ"hasn't hurt anyone yet. But we've had a dozen
accidents, a suicide, and two assaults-with-intent tonight. That
has hurt people."

It wasn't real easy to have a riot in a town of four thousand
people; particularly not when most of them were old-stock