Time Enough To Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

be surveyed properly before we begin. Manfred, you're in charge of the first team, Bryan the second, Jason the third."
    Jason looked up. “Huh?"
    Ashley looked down at her boots. She had the highest average in the class, but Sweeney didn't think she was leader material.
    "So then...” Sweeney made a sweeping gesture that took in the two newcomers. “Well, well, well, what have we here? Matilda Gray, is it?"
    "Hello, Howard,” said the woman.
    "Gareth March,” the man said, and exchanged a brisk handshake with Sweeney.
    "Ah!” Sweeney's brows coasted up his forehead. “You're our reporter. Going to write up the dig, eh?"
    "The Times Sunday magazine. Our Roman Heritage."
    "And Mrs.—er—Ms. Gray.... “Sweeney began.
    "Dr. Gray,” she corrected.
    "Dr. Gray will be my second-in-command,” he announced to the class, “being a scholar of some note on the opposite side of the Atlantic."
    Gray smiled indulgently at Sweeney, and in greeting at the students. “Hi."
    The students murmured hellos warily, as though trying to decide whether Gray gave pop quizzes. She seemed like a nice lady, Ashley thought, about her mother's age. But Laura Walraven looked as though she'd spent the last twenty years having electroshock treatments. Gray might have spent the same time sitting in the lotus position.
    With a hand in the small of her back, Sweeney turned Gray toward the masonry corner. “I was just telling the students, my dear...."
    "My name is Matilda, Howard."
    "Matilda,” he enunciated. “I was telling the students about the excavation plans. If you'd care to back me up...."
    "That's why I'm here, to back you up.” She stepped away from his controlling hand. “Please go on."
    He did, launching into a dissertation on the trench and grid method of excavation versus the open field method, and adding footnotes on stratigraphy, soil sampling, and the importance of record-keeping.
    Like a moon whose orbit is disturbed by a passing asteroid, Ashley found her attention wandering from Sweeney's plummy accent—he wasn't telling her anything she hadn't already studied, after all—toward Gareth March.
    He was very handsome, more mature than her fellow students, not as shady-looking—if not as exciting—as the man at the Job Centre. He stood aloof and poised, inspecting the site and its surroundings. His mouth might have been generous if it hadn't been set in such a stern line. His eyes were a dark opaque brown. When they spotted the horse and rider at Fortuna Stud Ashley was obscurely surprised they didn't snap like camera lenses. He came across like an android, except an android wouldn't have such springy red hair, cut short as though to curb its enthusiasm.
    He was watching two men walk along the fence—the same two men, Ashley realized, she'd seen at the Job Centre. One of them stopped and scraped the mud from his boots on the bottom rung. The rider pulled the horse's head around and trotted up to them. Ashley sidled closer to March, curiosity overcoming shyness. “Excuse me, are those men gypsies?"
    He glanced around. “Gypsies?"
    "I saw them in town a little while ago. A policeman told them to go away, and said something about caravans."
    "I expect they're travelers,” March replied. “New Age travelers, leftover hippies of a sort, unemployed young people living on the dole. They roam the countryside in clapped-out caravans—what you'd call travel trailers. There's a traveler encampment in a layby toward Macclesfield."
    "Are they criminals or something?"
    "Supposedly they harbor petty criminals such as thieves, drug peddlers, and tax dodgers. They fight mostly amongst themselves, though. The local people don't like them, don't trust them, and most certainly don't want them. They settle in large numbers and leave the land very untidy. Real gypsies, the original travelers, say the New Age travelers give them a bad reputation. Those two are probably offering to muck out the stables. Better than begging, at the least."
    The