"Jerry Oltion - Salvation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

and then his ears popped and bright sunlight stabbed his eyes and he
dropped about six inches onto dry sand.

“Welcome to the past,” William said from off to his left.

Billy blinked and squinted until his eyes adapted to the light. He knew
that William had planned to set the coordinates for his own jump to arrive a
few minutes before Billy, but it was still disorienting to find him already
there.

They had arrived in a rocky wilderness filled with scrub brush and the
occasional twisted, stunted tree. The city was just visible several miles in
the distance, and a camel caravan was winding its way around a hill to the
east, but there was nobody anywhere close to their landing site. Billy noted
that William had already cleared the rocks away from the spot where he
stood.

“I almost turned an ankle on one,” William explained when he realized
what Billy was looking at.

Billy took a deep breath of the air. He had expected it to smell better
than twenty-first-century Israel’s air, but there was a smoky tang to it that
spoke of many, many wood and dung fires burning for many, many years in
this land.

“Well,” he said. “Here we are.”

They spent the next few minutes preparing a place to hide the return
machine. When it arrived, they carried it over to the hollow they had dug
beneath a cedar tree and buried it there, wrapped in plastic to keep the
sand out of the works. Then they set out for Jerusalem, looking back often
to fix in their minds the spot where their return ticket waited.

When they arrived in town, their robes drew stares not for their style
but for their cleanliness. Apparently, people walking in out of the desert
seldom looked like they had just stepped out of a modern flat only a few
hours earlier. Billy was apprehensive about that at first, thinking that it was
seldom good to stand out among strangers, but the two travelers were
immediately greeted as visiting royalty, and when Billy explained in his
strangely accented Aramaic that they had come from a far, far land to visit
Jesus, they all nodded knowingly.

“His influence spreads like the wind,” said one of the men in the
crowd. “Come. I can take you to him.”

They set off through town, dragging a train of curious onlookers
behind them. Their guide kept up a constant barrage of questions about
their homeland and their travels, eager for news of the world beyond his
own, and Billy was hard pressed to portray a consistent story that didn’t
make them sound like lunatics. His Aramaic was stretched to the limit, and