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

one swollen spring, Ilma was sent to her aunt and—
"Hey! I haven't got much tape left, have I? Damn! Well, like I said, Miss Teckilla shooed me out and
pointed toward the bridge. Just before she slammed the schoolhouse door, she called out, 'Send Yalmar
over to me! We need him!'
"But when I got to the farm, I found it deserted. At least it looks that way. No stock in the barn. The
grain fields are overgrown with weeds, haven't been plowed in years. Even the serviceberry bushes around
the back door are brambled up so that they cover the kitchen window completely, and the porch boards
shifted and split when I moved up to pry open the sagging door. I was scared now, Doc. Plenty! How could
Ilma possibly be living here in this mess? Yalmar spent most of his time camping and hunting up in the hills
like a timber wolf; Old Izza might be dead. After all, he'd be well over ninety.
"I jumped for the door and wrenched it open. Inside it was all musty and bad-smelling, as if—"
 The brown tape gave a little jump as the end of it left the spool, then caught in the tape head.
"Damn you, Art Mackey!"
Steve knocked over his chair when he got up, jamming the tape player back in its leather case. Tony
came running out of the kitchen, onion knife brandished.
"What is it, Stephano? What happened to your friend?"
Steve grabbed up his gear and started for the door. "Something lethal, I hope. Or it will when I get hold
of him!"
"Why—where you going all of a sudden, Doctor?"
"Montana!"

CHAPTER THREE
It was like reading the next to last installment of a thriller in a dentist's waiting room—in a ten year old
magazine. Steve scowled as the San Francisco Airport limousine cut across the freeway fill east of
Brisbane. No, it was more than that. Arthur Mackey was his friend. His best friend. And Ilma was—well,
she was Art's girl. If that wasn't quite the way Steve wanted it... One meeting with Ilma was all it took.
"You'll have to change planes to Missoula," the girl at the desk told him, consulting her master charts.
"I know. Spokane's best."
"Most direct, yes, sir. But not best." She smiled with that irritating superiority mingled with dazzling
cheerfulness which characterizes airline people brainwashed to smile in the face of all manner of impossible
demands. "Let me see. Yes. We can get you on a flight to Seattle at 2 P.M. That's less than an hour.
You're lucky, Mr. McCord."
"But I don't want to go to Seattle."
"Then," she continued cheerfully, "we will put you on Intermountain straight to Missoula. It's fan jet, but
then we can't have everything. Only an hour and a half wait."
"What's the movie?" Steve grinned.
She smiled back, poising her ballpoint over the ticketer. "Will that be satisfactory, Mr. McCord? Or
would you rather have the six hour stopover in Spokane?"
"Seattle," Steve winced. "Please?"
Impulse tripping like this was hardly part of Doctor Stephen McCord's makeup, but this was different.
Urgent. Seething under Art's revelatory outburst were dimensions untapped. It wasn't like Art Mackey to
let loose his inner feelings and latent quirks in such a hemorrhage of rhetoric. It wasn't Finn. Steve had got
quite wound up in his research on the little known of beginnings of this oddly distinct branch of the human
race and he had learned quite a lot about them. From his books. From one trip to Helsinki and then above
the Arctic Circle to study the Finnish Lapps. Migratory. Elusive. Seemingly simple, yet incredibly complex
when you dipped down beneath the surface, when you gained some slight mastery of the difficult (unlike
any other on the planet) language.
While the fury of the jets carried him north, Steve mused about the Hellmouth Finns and what Art had
spilled out on that tape—as if talking to himself, as if it probably wouldn't ever get heard anyway—with a
gnawing sense of portent that couldn't delay his trip, not even by six hours.