"Dean Wesley Smith - VOR 03 - Island of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Dean Wesley)

Time:1:17A.M.Pacific Time
14 minutes before Arrival

Dr. Hank Downer shivered. The wind coming off thePacific Ocean cut through his light jacket as if it
wasn’t there, the salt air stinging his neck and face. He pulled the zipper up a little closer to his chin,
hoping to block even the smallest breath of wind. It did no good. He would never get used to the
dampness of the ocean air and the biting cold of theOregon nights. The weather there never seemed to
change.Cold rain and cold wind.Always the same.

At least at the moment there was no rain. But the wind felt like it was peeling off layers of skin. The noise
of the wind against his ears threatened to drown out his thoughts, but it was not enough to overpower the
sound of the pounding of the surf.

He and Stephanie Peters stood on a beach that stretched for kilometers of blackness in either direction.
To the south a few lights shone from the small coastal town ofDustin Cove . Once a thriving coastal
fishing community, the town was now populated mostly by research scientists like him and Stephanie and
the facility’s military contingent and their families. They all worked at the nearby Oregon Research
Facility. The Union government had long since bought out the original residents, more than likely for
security reasons.

In the other direction was nothing but sand and rock bluffs. This was a desolate stretch of land, isolated
from the population centers ofOregon by mountains. It must have been the isolation that had made the
governmentdecide to place the research center out there. But the government didn’t have to live there.

“Isn’t it a beautiful night?” Stephanie asked, putting her arm through his and pulling herself up close to
him. “Smell that wonderful ocean. After all day cooped up underground, this is great.”

It was a little after one in the morning, and they both had to be back in the lab at eight. If it were up to
him, he’d be asleep right now in a warm bed. But she had wanted to take a stroll on the beach, to “clean
some of the cobwebs out of my mind,” she had said. He hadn’t wanted her to go alone. Besides, it was a
rare chance to spend a little more time together.

So there they were.

Stephanie stood facing directly into the wind and took a long, deep breath. Then she pointed at the
black sky. “There are actually a few stars out.”
“Very few,” he said. The wind seemed to yank the words from his mouth and float them up the sand
dune and into the pine forest behind them. The paucity of stars in the clear night sky was just another of
many reminders that Earth wasn’t where it used to be. Six years ago the planet had been ripped from its
place among the stars and sucked into the anomalous space everyone now called the Maelstrom, a place
where the laws of physics seemed to take every other day as a holiday.

What Stephanie was calling stars he knew were mostly just planets that had been pulled in along with
Earth, close enough to reflect the bright light coming from the Maw.

She knew that, too, but Stephanie still liked to pretend they were stars and that the night sky was
beautiful. Not Hank. He could never forget the thousands of stars that once filled the heavens and the fun
of picking out the constellations or watching Mars and Jupiter move through them. For him, nothing could
compare with that. These few points of faint light, scattered like dots on a black page, would never be
enough to be beautiful to him.