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

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herded into taking. His face, scraped raw, bitten, and stung,
was puffed and swollen. His eyes had, narrowed into slits in
the tortured flesh. The steady ache at the base of his skull
spread across his shoulders and down his back. He had lost
all sense of feeling in his cramped arms. Yet in a way, he
welcomed all these , torments; they kept him from his
thoughts. Where was. he? What had happened? That this was
a dream he could no longer believe, no matter how he held
despairingly to such a hope.

The end to the need to keep staggering came at last.
Abruptly the valley came to shore land, and the stream
flowed on to form a miniature delta on the lip of a rolling
sea. Sea?

Keen salt air roused Ray to something again approaching
coherent thought. Sea? In the midst of a' continent? He
looked upon the pale crescent of sand with a kind of dull
horror.
There could be no sea here. But then here was not his own
world! He was firmly caught in a nightmare.

A hail from the beach urged his captors to a swifter pace,
and they dragged him with them, one on either side to jerk
him along. Down at the edge of that incredible water,
smoke, thin and tenuous as morning mist, plumed up from
a driftwood fire, and several dark figures stood to greet the
huntsmen.

"Still say fairy tale?" Fordham did not raise his eyes from the
view screen.

When Hargreaves did not answer, he glanced around. There
was a frown drawing the other's features into a pattern of
angry belligerence. Fordham had witnessed that reaction
before. This time he welcomed the sign of doubt battered
by evidence.

"All right. I see something-trees-like those on your other
films."

"Trees?" Fordham pushed. "Do they resemble any you have
seen before?"

"No-" Hargreaves' admission came reluctantly. Fordham
continued to press.