"Henry Kuttner - The Time Axis UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

The Big Ride. In between I grabbed at other things. One marriage, one divorce, and more and more bulges. Long bouts, between assignments. I didn't give a—well, you can't use that word in some papers. But it was all right. What did I expect, heaven?

The eyes aren't quite as clear as they used to be. The skin under them is a little puffy. One chin begins to be not quite enough. But it's still the Big Ride. With a splinter in the seat.

Dodging alimony payments, I skipped to Brazil, got in on a submarine exploration of the Amazon, wrote it up, sold it to AP as a feature. The first installment appeared on the same day as another little item—buried in the back—that said 85 and 87 had been made artificially.

Astatine and francium—the missing link in the periodic table—two billion years ago you could have picked up all the astatine and francium you wanted, just by reaching down and grabbing. If you'd been around at the time. Since then 85 and 87 have decayed into other elements. But Sea-borg and Ghiorso at UC made them synthetically, with the big cyclotron and atomic oven transmutation, and the column on one side of that trivial item said SECOND BURN-DEATH VICTIM FOUND, and on the other there was a crossword puzzle.

I didn't care, either.

Those deaths, by an indefinable sort of burning, were just starting to confound the United States authorities at the time. They hadn't yet spread to South America.

There was another item in that same ParAr that concerned me though I didn't know it at the time seemed that Ira De Kalb was working with Military Intelligence on some sort of highly secret project—so secret you could read all about it as far south as Rio if you had the price of the paper.

I had my own current problem. And it was a very odd one.

The thing started six weeks before it began. You'll have to get used to paradox—which isn't paradox once you grasp the idea.

It started in an alley in Rio, a little cobbled tunnel opening off the Rua d'Ouvidor, and what I was doing there at three o'clock of a summer morning in January I'll never be able to tell you. I'd been drinking. Also I'd been playing chemin de fer and there was a thick pad of banknotes in the inside pocket of my white jacket, another stuffed into the dark wine-colored cummerbund I was wearing.

Looking down, I could see the toes of my shoes twinkling in the moonlight as I walked. The sky twinkled too, and the lights up in the hills and out on the bay. The world was a shiny place, revolving gently around me.

I was rich. But this time it was going to last. This time I'd cut out the binges and take a little house up in Petropolis, where it's cool, and I'd really get down to work on the analysis of news-coverage I'd been planning for so long. I'd made up my mind. I was drunk but I'd be sober again and the resolution would stay behind when the liquor died.

I don't often get these fits of decision but when they come they're valid enough and I knew this one was serious. That was a turning point in the career of Jerry Cortland, there in the moonlight on the checkered pavement.

What happened at the mouth of that alley I'll never really know. Fortunately for me I couldn't see or realize it clearly, being drunk.

It sprang from the deep shadow and put out two arms at me. That much I'm sure of. Two arms that never touched me. They never meant to. They shot past my ears, and I heard a thin hissing noise and something seemed to turn over in my mind, leisurely, like a deep-buried thought stirring to life. I could all but feel it move.

I touched it.

I wish I hadn't. But I was thinking of my money. My hand closed on the thing—on a part of it—no one will ever know on just what. I Van only tell you it was smooth with a smoothness that burned my hand. Friction burned it, I think now. The sheer velocity of the thing, though it was not then moving perceptibly, took a neat thin layer of cuticle off my palm wherever it touched. I think it slid out of my grip on a thin lubrication of my own skin.

You know how it is when you touch something white-hot? For an instant it may feel cold. I didn't know I was burned. I closed my hand hard on the—on whatever it was I had hold of. And the very pressure of the grip seemed to push it away, out of my hand, very smooth and fast. All I know is that a moment later I stood there, shaking my band because it stung and watching something dark in the moonlight vanish down the street with a motion that frightened me.

I was too dazed to shout. By the time my wits came back it had disappeared and the feeling of unreality it left behind made me doubt whether I had ever seen or felt it at all.

About ten minutes later I found my money was gone. So it wasn't a turning point in my life, after all. If things had worked out any differently I never would have met Ira De Kalb. I never would have got myself mixed up in that series of deaths which so far as I was concerned were only signposts pointing the way to De Kalb. Maybe it was a turning point, at that.

The mind as well as the senses can be awfully slow sometimes. The hand doesn't know it has been burned, the mind can't recognize the impossible when it confronts it. There are many little refuges for a mind that must not admit to itself the impossible has happened.

I went back to my hotel that night and got into bed. I had met a thief, I told myself drowsily, as I'd deserved-walking a city street that late at night, loaded down with cash. I had it coming. He'd got my money and that was that. (He—it—hadn't touched the money, or me, except in that one brief unbalanced instant. The thing was impossible.

But since it had happened, then it was possible and the mind could dismiss it.) I went to sleep.

And woke at dawn to the most extraordinary experience I'd ever had in my life, up to then. Even that encounter on the Rua d'Ouvidor hadn't been like this.

The experience was pure sensation. And the sensation was somewhere inside me, vaguely in the solar plexus region—a soundless explosion of pure energy like a dazzling sun coming into sudden, radiant being. There aren't any accurate words to tell about it.