"Blish, James - And All The Stars A Stage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

the word. You couldn't afford to waste time hanging around the orifice of a
community telefax, until it should choose-as it did only once an hour-to
protrude the long sickly brown tongue of its transcript.
All this was difficult enough to blame upon a star that had exploded three
hundred years ago; but in view of the persistent triviality of the news,
and the high unlikelihood that the job-opportunities commercial could offer
anything whatsoever worth pounding the beltways to get, Jorn managed. In a
world in which hardly anything satisfied him, it was easy enough to wonder
how today might have differed from itself if history could somehow have
been re-arranged; and the exploding star was a natural beginning to such a
daydream, since before that event nothing, really, could be said to have
happened at all.
Oh, there had been the usual wars, the usual pestilences, the usual
migrations, the usual births and declines of nations, but the details of
daily life for the
 10 fames Blish
ordinary human being hardly changed from age to age. The industrial
revolution, of course, overturned all that; in the short course of slightly
more than a century, the average citizen of the wealthier countries found
himself in possession of riches beyond even the dreams of kings of any
earlier time; but even that great event was dwarfed by the supernova. In
fact, if Jorn remembered correctly, the industrial revolution had been still
in progress when the star exploded, though bow far along it had progressed
he could not be sure-his historical daydreams being more than a little
impeded by the fact that history had always been his weakest subject; the
might-have-beens kept getting mixed up with the facts.
In any event, when that mighty star rose in the night, everything was
changed. For a week it grew brighter and brighter, until it far outshone
any other object in the sky but the sun. At the peak of its 55-day life, it
was clearly visible in the daytime, a spearpoint of light too intense to be
looked at directly. At night, it cast distinct shadows and indeed was more
than bright enough to read by, so that for a little while the night as
everyone had known it in all the centuries before was effectively
abolished.
Thereafter it waned, slowly. It was still there, and could still be seen by
the naked eye if one knew where to look: a dim, ghostly blob of light, like
a flower in a medieval field of uncut grass, of about the eighth magnitude.
Through the telescope it was a spreading, crawling cloud of incandescent
gas something under two light years in diameter, vaguely crablike in shape,
still expanding in the sky at the rate of about four angular seconds per
year. Its apparent diameter was already so great that a half-credit coin
held at arm's length would not quite cover it, although of course the
nebula itself was quite invisible to the naked eye.
 And all the Stars a Stage 11
There was still a star in its heart, but it was a shrunken corpse now, well
on its way toward becoming a white dwarf.
But the naked eye had not been the only observer even then. By an amazing
stroke of luck-bad luck, in Jorn~s soured view--one of history's greatest
astronomical theorists had been watching it, through one of history's first
really efficient large electronically amplified telescopes, at the instant