Book description
His name was Vladislav Kuznetsov, and he had been a twenty-one-year-old
student at Mount Harwell College in Mount Harwell, Ohio. On a Friday
afternoon, March 24, 2001, he succumbed to a sudden attack of spring
fever and cut his classes for a stroll in a public park near the campus.
Even after fifty years and several hundred centuries, he remembered it
as vividly as though it had happened an hour before.
It was a warm, fresh day with a promise of spring--the first really
pleasant day of the year after the usual vagaries of a midwest winter.
He strolled leisurely through the park, thinking with shameless
delight of the stuffy classrooms he was avoiding. Eventually he seated
himself on a patch of greening grass with a convenient tree to lean
against and enjoyed the soft breeze and the peaceful surroundings
while he absently whittled on a twig he had picked up. He felt sleepy.
Probably he dozed off.
Then came a tremendous jerk, like having a chair pulled from under
him at the same instant that a truck hit him, and he almost lost
consciousness. He landed with a painful bump and skidded for a short
distance along a very rough wood floor. For a moment he sat gazing
about him dazedly. He had been abruptly translated from his seat on
the ground in a pleasant park on a lovely spring day to a seat on a
wood floor in a large, dim room with a thunderstorm raging outside. He
had a distinct impression that the two scenes had been linked by an
earthquake. He tried hard to focus his thoughts, staring first at a
table where a candle burned brightly and then at an animal tied to one
of the table's legs by a short leash. It was a hairy pig. He raised
his eyes to the room's two small, water-streaked windows and saw
nothing beyond but branches swaying in a strong wind...
