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

mattresses. He showed the children how to arrange the branches on the cavern floor and how to cover
them with the blankets which he took out of Sam's tail-compartment. Skip needed no further invitation to
turn in: exhausted from his enthusiastic activities and becalmed by his full stomach, he collapsed upon his
blanket as soon as he had it in place. Carpenter got three more blankets, covered him with one of them
and turned to Marcey, "You look tired, too, pumpkin."
"Oh, but I'm not, Mr Carpenter. Not in the least bit. I'm two years older than Skip, you know. He's
just a kid."

He folded the remaining two blankets into impromptu pillows and placed them a few feet from the
fire. He sat down on one of them; she sat down on the other. All evening, grunts and growls and groans
had been coming sporadically from beyond the shield-field; now they were supplanted by an awesome
noise that brought to mind a gigantic road-repair machine breaking up old pavement. The cavern floor
trembled, and the firelight flickered wildly on the wall. "Sounds like old tyrannosaurus," Carpenter said.
"Probably out looking for a midnight snack in the form of a struthiomimus or two."
" 'Tyrannosaurus,' Mr. Carpenter?"
He described the ferocious theropod for her. She nodded after he had finished, and a shudder shook
her. "Yes," she said, "Skip and I saw one. It was a little while after we crossed the river. We — we hid in
a clump of bushes till he passed. What terrible creatures you have here on. Earth, Mr. Carpenter!"
"They no longer exist in my day and age," Carpenter said. "We have terrible 'creatures' of another
order — 'creatures' that would send old tyrannosaurus high-tailing it for the hills like a flushed rabbit. I
shouldn't be complaining, though. Our technological debauchery left us with a cold-war hangover —
sure; but it paid off in quite a number of things. Time travel, for one. Interplanetary travel, for another." At
this point, the road-repair machine struck a bad stretch of pavement, and, judging from the ungodly series
of sound that ensued, blew a rod to boot. The girl moved closer to him. "Take it easy pumpkin. There's
nothing to worry about. An army of theropods couldn't break through that shield-field."
"Why do you call me 'pumpkin', Mr. Carpenter? On Mars, a pumpkin is an unpleasant squashy
vegetable that grows in swamps and midden-marshes."
He laughed. The sounds from beyond the shield-field diminished, then faded away, as the theropod
thundered off in another direction. "On Earth, a pumpkin is quite a nice vegetable—or maybe it's a fruit.
Whichever, it's quite respectable. But that's beside the point. 'Pumpkin' is what a man calls a girl when he
likes her."
There was a silence. Then, "Do you have a real girl, Mr. Carpenter?"
"Not actually, Marcy. You might say that figuratively speaking I worship one from afar."
"That doesn't sound like very much fun. Who is she?"
"She's my chief assistant at the North American Paleontological Society where I work — Miss
Sands. Her first name is 'Elaine', but I never call her by it. She sees to it that I don't forget anything when
I retro-travel, and she cases the place-times over a time-scope before I start out. Then she and my other
assistant, Peter Detritus, stand by, ready to come to the rescue if I should send back a can of chicken
soup. You see, a can of chicken soup is our distress signal. It's about as big an object as a
paleontologivehicle can handle in most cases, and the word 'chicken' in our language cannotes fear."
"But why do you worship her from afar, Mr. Carpenter?"
"Well you see," Carpenter said, "Miss Sands isn't just an ordinary run-of-the-mill girl. She's the cool,
aloof type — a goddess, if you know what I mean. Although I don't see how you possibly could.
Anyway, you simply don't treat goddesses the way you treat mere girls—you keep your distance and
worship them from afar and humbly wait for them to bestow favors upon you. I — I worship her so
much, in fact, that every time I'm near her I get so flustrated that I can hardly say anything. Maybe after I
get to know her better it'll be different. So far, I've known her three months."
 He fell silent. Marcy's hearrings twinkled in the firelight as she turned and looked gently up into his
face. "What's the matter, Mr. Carpenter — cat got your tongue?"
"I was just thinking," Carpenter said. "Three months is quite a long time at that—long enough for a