"Andre Norton - Time Traders 5 - Firehand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

his native Terra, he had clashed with those ancient, deadly star-traveling
people he had called the Baldies from their enlarged, hairless heads. They
were the enemies of his nightmare and subjects fit for nightmare with
their high-tech weapons, their fearsome powers of mental control, and
their seemingly absolute disregard for life forms other than their own.

His head lifted. He had beaten them that time. He had been part of the
team that had taken one of their starships and given it to Terra, that and
a library of journey tapes which had opened for his own kind the stars and
the planets circling them. He had helped to beat those same killers here.

The light left him again, and he sighed. Hawaika had been one of the
worlds to which the Baldies' tapes had brought Terran explorers. They had
found a lotus planet lacking any large life forms or history of life—until he,
Gordon Ashe, Karara Trehern, and her dolphin companions, Tinorau and
Taua, had been drawn back into the planet's past, just at the time when
the vicious earlier race was culminating their inexplicable plan to wipe the
native life from existence. They had helped unite the peoples—for there
were two distinct races—living here and had spearheaded the final attack
that drove the invaders off. The loss of the gate through which they had
come was proof of their ultimate success. Success and life for Hawaika,
doom for him and his.

The young man drew a long, shuddering breath. With their gate gone,
they were sealed back in time, in this alien world's history, forever severed
from their own age, their own people, their own work. Three months had
passed since that great battle. Three months, and already it felt like three
years. Or thirty…

He scowled as a splash and laugh penetrated his reverie. A
slender-bodied woman rose, leaped, out of the water some twenty yards
out from him, followed in the next moment by two delighted silver-blue
forms, rejoicing as only dolphins can in play.

Ross waved because some reaction was expected of him, but he quickly
turned away and began walking toward a rock formation farther down the
beach where he might sit and think at peace for a while.

The mission fate had set them had not proven a disaster for all of them,
he amended his previous thoughts. The dolphins had adopted this time
and world for their own, and Karara…

Murdock shivered despite the heat of the day. This world and time had
quite literally been made hers.

In their battle to defeat the invaders, the human Terrans had joined,
melded, with the three Foanna, the last remnant of the old, magical race
who had once ruled Hawaika. Need had forced them to take that drastic
step despite the danger that the effort might leave them somehow altered.
He and his partner, Doctor Gordon Ashe, had come through whole. To be