"Murray Leinster - The Best of Murray Leinster (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

sf magazines of thirty or forty years ago. Leinster's classics have escaped
that fate.
Oh, you can tell which ones were written in the 1930s as opposed to the
1950s; styles change, after all. But his stories hardly seem dated at all.
"The Fourth-dimensional Demonstrator," for instance, could be made the basis
for a television comedy tomorrow with only minor changes. Given human nature,
the ethical problems of "First Contact" are as real today as in 1944-much as
one might regret some ethnic references inspired by World War II.
Leinster was a man who was interested hi the world-in people and ideas.
Too many writers can't seem to get interested in anything but themselves. Just
as the best teacher is one who can get excited about what he's teaching, the
best writer is one who can get excited about what he's writing. Leinster could
and did, and his stories still communicate that excitement.
From the adventures in parallel worlds of "Sidewise in Time" to the
moral conflicts of "First Contact" to the grim struggle to save a seemingly
doomed world in "Critical Difference," Murray Leinster is still a good read.


John J. Pierce
Berkeley Heights, N.J.
June 28, 1977

Sidewise in Time



FOREWORD



LOOKING BACK, IT seems strange that no one but Professor Minott figured the
thing out in advance. The indications were more than plain, In early December
of 1934 Professor Michaelson announced his finding that the speed of light was
not an absolute could not be considered invariable. That, of course, was one
of the first indications of what was to happen.
A second indication came on February 15th, when at 12:40 p.m., Greenwich
mean time, the sun suddenly shone blue-white and the enormously increased rate
of radiation raised the temperature of the earth's surface by twenty-two
degrees Fahrenheit in five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, the sun
went back to its normal rate of radiation without any other symptom of
disturbance.
 A great many bids for scientific fame followed, of course, but no
plausible explanation of the phenomenon accounted for a total lack of after
disturbances in the sun's photosphere.
For a third clear forerunner of the events of June, on March 10th the
male giraffe in the Bronx Zoological Park, in New York, ceased to eat. In the
nine days following, it changed its form, absorbing all its extremities, even
its neck and head, into an extraordinary, eggshaped mass of still-living flesh
and bone which on the tenth day began to divide spontaneously and on the
twelfth was two slightly pulsating fleshy masses.