"Robert F. Young - When Time Was New" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

or not, there was a good chance that the fossil which the North American Paleontological Society had
sent him back to the Mesozoic Era to investigate might turn out to be his own.
Nevertheless, he refused to let the possibility bother him. For one thing, the minute he found himself in
a jam, all he had to do was to contact his two assistants, Miss Sands and Peter Detritus, and they would
come flying-to his aid in Edith the therapod or one of the other reptivehicles which NAPS kept on hand.
For another, he had already learned that outside forces were at work in the Cretaceous Period. He
wasn't the only candidate for fossil-dom. Anyway, worrying about such matters was a waste of time:
what was going to happen had already happened, and that was all there was to it.

Skip crawled out of the cabin and leaned over the back of the driver's seat. "Marcy sent you up a
sandwich and a bottle of pop, Mr. Carpenter," he said, handing over both items. And then, "Can I sit
beside you, sir?"
"Sure thing," Carpenter said, moving over.
The boy climbed over the backrest and slid down into the seat. No sooner had he done so than
another buttercup-colored head appeared. "Would — would it be all right, Mr. Carpenter, if — if —"
"Move over and make room for her in the middle, Skip."
Sam's head was a good five feet wide, hence the driver's compartment was by no means a small
one.
But the seat itself was only three feet wide, and accommodating two half-grown kids and a man the
size of Carpenter was no small accomplishment, especially in view of the fact that all three of them were
eating sandwiches and drinking pop. Carpenter felt like an indulgent parent taking his offspring on an
excursion through a zoo.
And such a zoo! They were in the forest now, and around them Cretaceous oaks and laurels stood;
there were willows, too, and screw pines and gingkos galore, and now and then they passed through
incongruous stands of fan palms. Through the undergrowth they glimpsed a huge and lumbering creature
that looked like a horse in front and a kangaroo in back. Carpenter identified it as an anatosaurus. In a
clearing they came upon a struthiomimus and startled the ostrich-like creature half out of its wits. A
spike-backed ankylosaurus glowered at them from behind a clump of sedges, but discreetly refrained
from questioning Sam's right of way. Glancing into a treetop, Carpenter saw him first archaeopteryx.
Rising his eyes still higher, he saw the circling pteranodons.
He had hoped to lose them after entering the forest, and to this end he held Sam on an erratic course.
Obviously, however, they were equipped with matter detectors. A more sophisticated subterfuge would
be necessary. There was a chance that he might bring them down with a barrage of stun-charges, but it
was a slim one and he decided not to try it in any event. The kidnapers undoubtedly deserved to die for
what they had done, but he was not their judge. He would kill them if he had to, but he refused to do it as
long as he had an ace up his sleeve.
Turning toward the two children, he saw that they had lost interest in their sandwiches and were
looking apprehensively upward. Catching their eye, he winked. "I think it's high time we gave them the
slip, don't you?"
"But how, Mr. Carpenter?" Skip asked. "They're locked right on us with their detector-beams.
We're just lucky ordinary Martians like them can't buy super Martian weapons. They've got melters,
which are a form of iridescers: but if they had real iridescers; we'd be goners."
"We can shake them easy, merely by jumping a little ways back in time. Come on, you two — finish
your sandwiches and stop worrying."
Their apprehension vanished, and excitement took its place. Let's jump back six days," Marcy said.
"They'll never find us then because we won't be here yet."
"Can't do it, pumpkin — it would take too much starch out of Sam. Time-jumping requires a
tremendous amount of power. In order for a part-time time-machine like Sam to jump any great distance,
its power has to be supplemented by the power of a regular time station. The station propels the
reptivehicle back to a pre-established entry area, and the time-traveler drives out of the area and goes