"Michael Swanwick - Radiant Doors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

the sea of clutching hands, like that of a woman drowning.

Shriver seized my elbow and steered me away before I could see any more. I saw
enough, though.


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 Radiant Doors by Michael Swanwick This story first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1998


I saw too much.

"Where are we going?" I asked when I'd recovered my wits.

"Where do you think we're going?"

He led me to my office.

There was a stranger waiting there. He took out a hand-held detector like
Sergeant-Major Pathak and his men had used earlier and touched it to himself, to
Shriver, and to me. Three times it flashed red, negative. "You travel through time,
you pick up a residual charge," Shriver explained. "It never goes away. We've
known about Gevorkian for a long time."

"US Special Security," the stranger said, and flipped open his ID. It meant diddle-
all to me. There was a badge. It could have read Captain Crunch for all I knew or
cared. But I didn't doubt for an instant that he was SS. He had that look. To
Shriver he said, "The neutralizer."

Shriver unstrapped something glittery from his wristтАУthe device he'd used to undo
Gevorkian's weaponтАУand, in a silent bit of comic bureaucratic punctilio,
exchanged it for a written receipt. The security officer touched the thing with his
detector. It flashed green. He put both devices away in interior pockets.

All the time, Shriver stood in the background, watching. He wasn't told to go
away.

Finally, Captain Crunch turned his attention to me again. "Where's the snark?"

"Snark?"

The man removed a thin scrap of cloth from an inside jacket pocket and shook it
out. With elaborate care, he pulled it over his left hand. An inertial glove. Seeing
by my expression that I recognized it, he said, "Don't make me use this."


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 Radiant Doors by Michael Swanwick This story first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1998