"Emil Petaja - The Time Twister" - читать интересную книгу автора (Petaja Emil)

and you were studying medicine—"
"I didn't quite have the stomach for it, I guess. Anyway, I like research in anthropology better. Glad I
switched."
"—and you told Arturo that, if you had to be in one of their blasted wars at all, it would be to do what
you could to patch people up and not—" Tony broke off with a toothy laugh. "Forget all that! You're back
now.
But where's your buddy? Where's Arturo, the Flying Finn? Wasn't that what they called him?"
"That was Nurmi," Steve smiled. "Art Mackey's gone up to Montana to find— Tony, do you remember
the last night we were here? Art and I sat right here waiting for Ilma. She had a late rehearsal at the Opera
House, and when she finally came down those stairs, she was—"
"Radiant! Like something out of a dream!" Tony's eyes lighted up and he kissed his fingers at the brief
elbow-stairs entrance, making the fat swabber blink. "She was still in her costume. Green, pale green. She
moved in out of the fog like a dryad. And when she tossed back her great velvet cloak. All that hair down
to her shoulders. Like spun gold! Do I remember!"
Steve, too, stared and saw Ilma there, hurrying down out of the drifting evening fog, stopping to search
the bustling, smokey room with those large silver-blue eyes. Seeing Art. Smiling. How the whole world
seemed to tilt. How Steve couldn't take his eyes away from this dazzling forest creature. Ilma Halvor was
something out of a rare, half-remembered dream of old, old times.
"...and when she danced The Bird Girl in the new Green Mansions ballet, everybody said she would go
straight to the top. There was something supernatural about Ilma, they said, and I believe them. Then—all
of a sudden—she left the ballet! Disappeared! Why?" Tony's opera loving soul was wounded by such
dereliction to duty and that he knew Ilma and her lover, Art the footballer, made him scowl and cluck while
he swigged his mud-thick espresso.
"She went back to Hellmouth. Her father needed her. Izza Halvor is very old. Very old. Sick. There's a
brother, too, Art told me. Yalmar. Yalmar's—strange. A little off in the head. Wanders the hills a lot.
Fiercely devoted to Ilma, but not much help with an old, sick father."
"So Ilma went back to the sticks. Such a waste!" Tony sighed.
"She might come back to the theater," Steve said. "Art's up there now." He frowned out at the brass
bright day.
"Something's wrong, Stephano."
Steve shrugged. "I don't know that there is. But Art hadn't heard from her, not a word in over a month."
"These hick towns," Tony pointed out. "How do they get their mail in this Hellmouth? By pack mule?"
Steve grinned uneasily. "As a matter of fact, I just got a message from Art."
"What does he say?"
"Haven't played it yet."
"Played it?"
"It's a tape." Steve dug it out and unwrapped it. "I brought along my Sony transistor player. Mind?" He
removed the tape player from its leather case and threaded up Art's tape. The battered plastic spool
wobbled a little as the tape end caught in the rewind spool and snapped to.
Tony's wide face hung over the table avidly. Steve resisted his impulse to invite solitude until he knew
just what Art had to say, but it was Tony's wife yelling from the kitchen that it was almost eleven and
nothing was ready that popped an Italian oath from him and his reluctant removal to his pre-lunch duties.
Steve waited until the kitchen batwings slapped Tony's broad rear, sighed relief as he took a sip of
strong coffee, and flipped the threaded tape to "forward."

CHAPTER TWO
"Hi, Doc. How are you making it?"
The mechanical voice that was somehow Art Mackey's deep baritone an octave or two higher seemed
strained. Or was it the minuscule speaker? Or Steve's imagination? Art was always the easygoing, like
everybody sort who took things as they came. Yet the self-conscious banalities he put in for openers