"Chad Oliver - The Winds of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oliver Chad)

Must be some natural explanation. An airplane crash? Maybe I should have said something,
tried to help … But he kept moving.
Trees began to loom up around him, and he caught the lush smell of wet pines. The moonlight was
filtered now, and shadows tricked him on the path. He forded the stream again, kept going.
The path twisted sharply to the right. Wes took the curve almost at a run, then stopped as though he
had slammed full-tilt into a brick wall. The same man was waiting for him on the trail. He stood there, not
moving, only half revealed by the chilled radiance of the moonlight. His face was as dead white as it had
seemed in the cave. He was tall, taller than Wes, and thin. His eyes were living shadows in the pallor of
his face.
"Who are you?" Wes called. His voice was higher than he had intended. "What do you want?"
 The man said nothing. The brook gurgled in the night.
"Talk, damn you! What the hell're you trying to pull?"
No answer.
Wes steadied himself, gripped the rock in his hand. He was not going to run back up the mountain
again. "Get out of my way," he said.
The man—if such he was—did not move.
Wes had been a reasonably creditable halfback in his high school days, and he had run over bigger
men than this. He took his glasses off, put them in his trouser pocket, where they wouldn't be hit directly.
Then he squinted, took a deep breath, and rushed the man standing in the trail, his rock ready to swing.
Quite calmly the man raised his arm. He had something in his hand. The something gave a soft choog
and Wes Chase found himself flat on the ground, his face actually touching one of the man's shoes. He
had never seen a shoe like it before.
He seemed to be fully conscious, but he could not move. He heard his heart thudding in his chest. He
could not feel the ground under him. He was suddenly peaceful, peaceful beyond all reason. It was the
peace of a dream, where nothing mattered, for soon you would wake up and it would all go away …
It didn't go away.
The man—it must be a man—did not speak. He picked Wes up and tossed him onto his shoulder,
not ungently, but with a singular lack of concern. Like a sack of potatoes, Wes thought.
The man began to climb back up the mountain. I weiqh almost two hundred pounds, he can't
possibly lug me all the way to the top.
But he was doing it. He gasped for breath and set Wes down every few hundred yards while he
rested, but he kept going. Wes watched the trees fade out and the rocks begin, and he saw the moon,
alone and cold and remote in the night.
Slowly, determinedly, they climbed toward the glacial lake.
They turned off toward the rock shelter. Wes saw his trout basket still lying where he had dropped it,
and irrelevantly thought that the fish would still be good because it had been so cold. He saw his rod
case, too, but his hat, wherever it had fallen, was outside his field of vision.
The man went into the cave first and pulled Wes in after him. Then he dragged him some fifteen feet
across the cave floor, to where Wes had first seen the metallic reflection he had thought was a vein of
ore. Not ore. Door.
The man opened a concealed port that looked like the hatch of a submarine. Pale radiance, not unlike
the moonlight outside, spilled into the cavern. The man went through the port and pulled Wes after him.
Then he shut the port. Wes heard the distinct click as it locked.
The man dragged him into a semblance of a sitting position against one wall and then backed off. Wes
tried to move, but failed. He had no sensation of pressure where he sat or where he leaned against the
wall. He was dead from the neck down.
But his eyes worked. He looked around as best he could.
He was in a large rock vault, perhaps forty yards across at its deepest point. It was apparently a
natural cave of some sort, although it had been cleared of all debris until it was rather featureless.
And, of course, it had been sealed off from the world by that curious entry port.