"Anderson, Poul - There Will Be Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

He tossed off his drink and held out the glass. In the yellow lamplight, gaunt against the winter window, his face congealed with resolution. "Give me a refill, please," he said, "and I wifi tell you."
"Great." The bottle shook a bit in my grasp as the liquor clucked forth. "I swear to respect any confidentiality."
He laughed, a rattling noise. "No need for oaths, Doc. You'll keep quiet."
I waited.
He sipped, stared past me, and murmured: "I'm glad. It's been such a burden, through my whole life, never to share the
the fact of what I am."
I streamed smoke from my lips and waited.
He said in a rush, "For the most part I was in the San Francisco area, especially Berkeley. For more than a year."
My fingers clenched on the pipe bowl.
"Uh-huh." He nodded. "I came home after a month's ab
sence. But I'd spent about eighteen months away. From the fall of 1969 to the end of 1970."
After a moment, he added: "That's not a whole year and a half. But you've got to count my visits to the further future."
Steam hissed in the radiator. I saw a sheen of sweat on the forehead of my all but adopted son. He gripped his tumbler as tightly as I my pipe. Yet in spite of the tension in him, his voice remained level.
"You have a time machine?" I breathed.
He shook his head. "No. I move around in time by myself. Don't ask me how. I don't know."
His smile jerked forth. "Sure, Doc," he said. "Paranoia. The delusion that I'm something special in the cosmos. Okay, I'll give you a demonstration." He waved about. "Come here, please. Check. Make certain I've put no mirrors, trapdoors, gimmickry in your own familiar office."
Numbly, I felt around him, though it was obvious he'd had no chance to bring along, or rig, any apparatus.
"Satisfied?" he asked. "Well, I'll project myself into the future. How far? Half an hour? No, too long for you to sit here gnawing your pipe. Fifteen minutes, then." He checked his watch against my wall clock. "It's 4:17, agreed? I'll reappear at 4:30, plus or minus a few seconds." Word by word: "Just make sure nobody or nothing occupies this chair at that period. I can't emerge in the same space as another solid body."
I stood back and trembled. "Go ahead, Jack," I said through the thuttering in my veins.
Tenderness touched him. He reached to squeeze my hand. "Good old Doc. So long."
And he was gone. I heard a muted whoosh of air rushing in where he had sat, and nothing else. The chair stood empty. I felt, and no form occupied it.
I sat down once more at my desk, and stared for a quarter of an hour which I don't quite remember.
Abruptly, there he was, seated as he had been.
I struggled not to faint. He hurried to me. "Doc, here, take it easy, everything's okay, here, have a drink-"
Later he gave me a one-minute show, stepping back from
that near a future to stand beside himself, until the first body vanished.

Night gathered.
"No, I don't know how it works," he said. "But then, I don't know how my muscles work, not in the way you know-and you'll agree your scientific information is only a glimmer on the surface of a mystery."
"How does it feel?" I asked, and noticed in surprise the calm which had come upon me. I'd been stunned longer on Hiroshima Day. Well, maybe the bottom of my mind had already guessed what Jack Havig was.
"Hard to describe." He frowned into darkness. "I . . . wifi myself backward or forward in time . . . the way I will to, oh, pick my glass off your desk. In other words, I order whatever-it-is to move me, the same as we order our fingers to do something, and it happens."
He searched for words before he went on: "I'm in a shadow world while I time-travel. Lighting varies from zero to gray. If I'm crossing more than one day-and-night period, it flickers. Objects look dim, foggy, flat. Then I decide to stop, and I stop, and I'm back in normal time and solidness. . . . No air reaches me on my way. I have to hold my breath, and emerge occasionally for a lungful if the trip takes that long in my personal time."
"Wait," I said. "If you can't breathe en route, can't touch anything or be touched, can't be seen-how come you have the feeble vision you do? How can light affect you?"
"I don't know either, Doc. I've read physics texts, however, trying to get a notion about that as well as everything else. And, oh, it must be some kind of force which moves me. A force operating in at least four dimensions, nevertheless a force. If it has an electromagnetic component, I can imagine how a few photons might get caught in the field of it and carried along. Matter, even ionized matter, has rest mass and therefore can't be affected in this fashion. . . . That's a layman's guess. I wish I dared bring a real scientist in on this."
"Your guess is too deep for me already, friend. Uh, you said
a crossing isn't instantaneous, as far as you yourself are concerned. How long does it take? How many minutes per year, or whatever?"
"No particular relationship. Depends on me. I feel the effort I'm exerting, and can gauge it roughly. By, well, straining, I can move . . . faster . . . than otherwise. That leaves me exhausted, which seems to me to prove that time traveling uses body energy to generate and apply the thrusting force. . . . It's never taken more than a few minutes, according to my watch; and that was a trip through several centuries."
"When you were a baby-" My voice halted.
He nodded anew. "Yeah, I've heard about the incident. Fear of faffing's an instinct, isn't it? I suppose when my mother dropped me, I threw myself into the past by sheer reflex.
and thereby caused her to drop me."
He took a swallow of brandy. "My ability grew as I grew. I probably have no limit now, if I can stop at need, along the way, to rest. But I am limited in the mass I can carry along. That's only a few pounds, including clothes. More, and I can't move; it's like being weighted down. If you grabbed me, for instance, I'd be stuck in normal time till you let go, because you're too much for me to haul. I couldn't just leave you behind; the force acts, or tries to act, on everything in direct contact with me." A faint smile. "Except Earth itself, if I happen to be barefoot. I suppose that much mass, bound together not only by gravitation but by other, even stronger forces, has a- what?-a cohesion?-of its own."
"You warned me against putting a solid object where you planned to, uh, materialize," I said.
"Right," he answered. "I can't, in that case. I've experimented. Traveling through time, I can move around meanwhile in space if I want. That's how I managed to appear next to myself. By the way, the surface I'm on may rise or sink, but I rise or sink likewise, same as when a person stands somewhere in normal time. And, aside from whatever walking I do, I stay on the same geographical spot. Never mind that this planet is spinning on its axis, and whirling around a sun which is rushing through a galaxy. . . I stay here. Gravitation again, I suppose.
Yes, about solid matter. I tried entering a hill, when I was a child and thoughtless. I could go inside, all right, easy as stepping into a bank of fog. But then I was cut off from light, and I couldn't emerge into normal time, it was like being in concrete, and my breath ran out-" He shivered. "I barely made it back to the open air."
"I guess matter resists displacement by you," I ventured. "Fluids aren't too hard to shove aside when you emerge, but solids are."
"Uh-huh, that's what I figured. If I'd passed out and died inside that rock and dirt, I guess my body would've-well, been carried along into the future at the ordinary rate, and fallen back into normal existence when at last the hill eroded away from around it."
"Amazing how you, a mere tad, kept the secret."
"Well, I gather I gave my mother a lot of worries. I don't actually remember. Who does recall his first few years? Probably I needed a while to realize I was unique, and the realization scared me-maybe time traveling was a Bad Thing to do. Or perhaps I gloated. Anyway, Uncle Jack straightened me out."
"Was he the unknown who brought you back when you'd been lost?"
"Yes. I do remember that. I'd embarked on a long expedition into the past, looking for Indians. But I only found a forest. He showed up-having searched the area through a number of years-and we had it nice together. Finally he took my hand and showed me how to come home with him. He could've delivered me within a few minutes of my departure and spared my parents those dreadful hours. But I believe he wanted me to see how I'd hurt them, so the need for discretion would really get driven into me. It was."