"Jack Williamson - The Legion of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

yesterday and tomorrow are alike eternal, immutable as the structure of space itself."

But the haunted loveliness of Lethonee rose against the page. How did that fit with her tale of worlds that might be,
striving for existence?

He flung aside the book, helped himself to a generous slug of Barry Halloran's Irish whisky, and walked blindly down
through Harvard square. It was late when at last he came in to bed, and then he slept with a dream of Lethonee.

He wanted to tell Barry, next morning; for they had been closer than brothers. But he thought the big redhead would
only laugh—as he himself might have laughed if another had told him the thing. And he didn't want laughter at that
dream, not even from Barry.

Half sick with a confusion of wonder and doubt, of hopeless hope for another glimspe of Lethonee and bitter dread
that she had been all illusion, Lanning tried to read a textbook and found himself aimlessly walking the room.

"Buck up, kid!" Barry boomed at him. "I never thought you'd be shaky—Max says you've got the nerves of a hawk.
I'm the one that should be turning green around the gills. Come out of it, and let's catch some sparrows."

Lanning stood up, uncertainly—and then the phone rang. He had made his own expenses, that year, covering
university activities for a Boston paper; and this was his editor. It was an assignment that could have been evaded.
But, listening, he saw the tragic eyes of Lethonee.

"Okay, Chief," he said. "On the job." He hung up and looked at Barry. "Sorry, old man. But business first. Tell Max I'll
be out tomorrow. And happy landings, guy."

'Tough luck, kid."

The big tackle grinned, and crushed bis hand, and ambled out.

Lanning read in his own paper, four hours later, that Barry Halloran was dead. The training plane had gone out of
control, two thousand feet over Boston harbor, and plunged down into the Charles River channel. Grappling hooks
had brought part of the battered wreckage up out of the mud, but the body had not been recovered.

Lanning shut his eyes against the black headlines,

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reeling. He was sick with a dread that was almost terror, numbed with a black regret. For Lethonee had saved his own
life, he knew—but at the cost of Barry Halloran's.

C
apter

THE CORRIDOR OF TIME
LANNING FELT NO GRATITUDE for the warning that had saved his life, but rather a sick regret, an aching sense of
guilt for Barry's death. Yet he could feel no actual resentment toward Lethonee—the tragedy seemed a terrible proof of
her reality. In her grave and troubled beauty, surely, there had been no evil.

A kind of excitement buoyed up Lanning for a few days, and made his grief endurable. There was his hope that she
would come back—her memory was a haunting pain of loneliness, that would not die. Even her enigmatic warning, and