"Andre Norton - Operation timesearch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

was never to reach that safety a foot or so more of soil
might have given him. Something within him stiffened;
he could not move.
Unable to stir so much as a finger, he stood impotently
waiting the arrival of his captors. With the aid of their
single strange weapon, they blasted a series of steps up
the side of the gully. He had not died at once as had the
elk; that was all he knew.
They approached him in a body, and Ray stared
steadily back at them. The immobility of their heavy
features and the lack of readable emotion in their
opaque eyes was disquieting. Masks, Ray thought,
subtly evil masks. With an icy qualm he realized he
was confronting something alien, beyond the bounda-
ries of his old sane world.
Now they circled him warily, studying their capture.
The weapon-bearing leader broke the silence with an
interrogation in a guttural, hissing tongue. When Ray
did not reply, the man's brutal jaw thrust forward
pugnaciously.
Again he questioned, but this time in a murmur,
almost sing-song. Another language, Ray guessed. His
continued silence appeared to disconcert his captors a
little.
At last the leader snapped an order. From his belt
one of the others freed a thong of hide and stepped behind
Ray, to whip his powerless wrists together and lash them
tight. Still under the influence of the strange weapon, Ray
was forced to submit. He was shaken with a sudden
loathing at the touch of the hunter.



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Once he was bound, the leader raised the rod. No beam
from its tip followed, but Ray was up-frozen again. Without
a backward glance, the rod bearer walked away. The hunter
who had bound Ray flicked him across the shoulders with
the end of that thong, pointing after. Ray's loathing heated
into anger, not only at his captors, but also somehow at the
whole disaster that had befallen him. He might not know
where he was or why, but the feeling that he would learn
and exact payment after that learning steadied him. He
found strength in his anger, and he clung to it as a drowning
man might cling to a rock in the midst of a raging river.

They followed the lip of the gully for about half a mile
before there was a break in the steepness of the wall. Ray,