"Damon Knight - Anachron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

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Anachron
by Damon Knight
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Copyright (c)1953, 1976 by Damon Knight
Originally published by Quinn Publishing Company in 1953

Fictionwise Contemporary
Science Fiction


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THE BODY was never found. And for that reason alone, there was no body
to find.
It sounds like inverted logic -- which, in a sense, it is -- but
there's no paradox involved. It was a perfectly orderly and explicable event,
even though it could only have happened to a Castellare.
Odd fish, the Castellare brothers. Sons of a Scots-Englishwoman and an
expatriate Italian, born in England, educated on the Continent, they were at
ease anywhere in the world and at home nowhere.
Nevertheless, in their middle years, they had become settled men.
Expatriates like their father, they lived on the island of Ischia, off the
Neapolitan coast, in a palace -- quattrocento, very fine, with peeling cupids
on the walls, a multitude of rats, no central heating and no neighbors.
They went nowhere, no one except their agents and their lawyers came to
them. Neither had ever married. Each, at about the age of thirty, had given up
the world of people for an inner world of more precise and more enduring
pleasures. Each was an amateur -- a fanatical, compulsive amateur.
They had been born out of their time.
Peter's passion was virtu. He collected relentlessly, it would not be
too much to say savagely; he collected as some men hunt big game. His taste
was catholic, and his acquisitions filled the huge rooms of the palace and
half the vaults under them -- paintings, statuary, enamels, porcelain, glass,
crystal, metalwork. At fifty, he was a round little man with small, sardonic
eyes and a careless patch of pinkish goatee.
Harold Castellare, Peter's talented brother, was a scientist. An
amateur scientist. He belonged in the nineteenth century, as Peter was a
throwback to a still earlier epoch. Modern science is largely a matter of
teamwork and drudgery, both impossible concepts to a Castellare. But Harold's
intelligence was in its own way as penetrating and original as a Newton's or a