Отрывок из книги
I am indebted to the late Dr. Anthony T. Lawton, one-time President of the British Interplanetary Society, for checking and supplying data on star evolution and the mechanism of novae and supernovae. To Michael Guest, former Secretary of Midland Dowsers, for checking the description of dowsing. The interpretation of this information is entirely mine! To Paul Barnett for his encouragement and for editing the final ms. And not least to my wife, Ruth (a non-SF reader, normally), for painstakingly reading and re-reading this story and offering many valuable comments, suggestions, and corrections.
The darkened land lay swathed in bandages of cloud which, pallidly reflecting the light of a full moon, hid fresh wounds and old scars alike.
.....
“Go to sleep, my baby...,” crooned Dorothy Petrie drowsily, regretting for the thousandth time that she had ever let her husband, Rory, persuade her to leave Scotland for London when he was offered a better-paid job. Now he was away in the trenches, Lord knew where, up to his eyes in mud or worse, while she, instead of being safely asleep in their old, stone-built cottage tucked snugly into the hillside, tried to doze on a horse-hair sofa while her eight-year-old son Stephen waved his toy guns, assiduously shooting down the airplanes droning endlessly overhead, and her baby daughter, Aurora, tossed restlessly in her cot, whimpering, about to cry again.
Aurora. The imaginative name had been Dorothy’s idea. The Northern Lights had been draping their ethereal multicolored banners above the cottage on the night Dorothy and the kids had left for the south, for London.
.....
