Poul Anderson - Time Patrol 01 by The Guardians of Time

Author:The Guardians of Time
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-11-24T12:46:50+00:00

a fifty-mile strait. Its volume amounted to ten thousand cubic miles a year, a hundred Victoria Falls or a thousand Niagaras.

Thus the statistics. The reality was a roar of white water, spray-shrouded, earth-sundering, mountain-shaking. Men could see, hear, feel, smell, taste the thing; they could not imagine it.

When the channel widened, the flow grew smoother, until it ran green and black. Then mists diminished and islands appeared, like ships which cast up huge bow waves; and life could again grow or go clear to the shore. Yet most of those islands would be eroded away before the century was out, and much of that life would perish in weather turned strange. For this event would move the planet from its Miocene to its Pliocene epoch.

And as he flitted onward, Nomura did not hear less noise, but more. Though the stream itself was quieter here, it moved toward a bass clamor which grew and grew till heaven was one brazen bell. He recognized a headland whose worndown remnant would someday bear the name Gibraltar. Not far beyond, a cataract twenty miles wide made almost half the total plunge.

With terrifying ease, the waters slipped over that brink. They were glass-green against the darkling cliffs and umber grass of the continents. Light flamed off their heights. At their bottom another cloud bank rolled white in ever-ending winds. Beyond reached a blue sheet, a lake whence rivers hewed canyons, out and out across the alkaline sparkle, dust devils and mirage shimmers of the furnace land which they would make into a sea.

It boomed, it brawled, it querned.

Again Feliz poised her flyer. Nomura drew alongside. They were high; the air whittered chilly around them.

“Today,” she told him, “I want to try for an impression of the sheer size. I’ll move in close to the top, recording as I go, and then down.”

“Not too close,” he warned.

She bridled. “I’ll judge that.”

“Uh, I… I’m not trying to boss you or anything.” I’d better not. I, a plebe and a male. “As a favor, please—” Nomura flinched at his own clumsy speech. “—be careful, will you? I mean, you’re important to me.”

Her smile burst upon him. She leaned hard against her safety harness to catch his hand. “Thank you, Tom.” After a moment, turned grave: “Men like you make me understand what is wrong in the age I come from.”

She had often spoken kindly to him: most times, in fact. Had she been a strident militant, no amount of comeliness would have kept him awake nights. He wondered if perhaps he had begun loving her when first he noticed how conscientiously she strove to regard him as her equal. It was not easy for her, she being almost as new in the Patrol as he—no easier than it was for men from other areas to believe, down inside where it counted, that she had the same capabilities they did and that it was right she use herself to the full.

She couldn’t stay solemn. “Come on!” she shouted. “Hurry!

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