"Murray Leinster - Time Tunnel " - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

never thought of it." Harrison was silent a moment. Then he
changed the subject. "What have you been doing?"
Pepe sketched, with enthusiasm, his activities since Har-
rison had last seen him. He'd been home in Mexico. For a
while he was in Tehuantepec. She was a lovely girl! Then he'd
been in Tegucigalpa. She was charming! And then he'd been
in Aguascalientes, and the name fitted! She was una rubaya,
a red-head. Mmmmmmmh! But there'd been trouble there.
His family had sent him to France until the affair blew over.
Now he was being very virtuous. Seriously, what was Harrison
doing in Paris?
"I've been digging," said Harrison, "in the manuscript
section of the Bibliotheque Nationale. Did you know, Pepe,
that a century and a half before Pasteur, there was someone
who described in detail the idea that living things too small
to be seengerms, in factcould be responsible for con-
tagious diseases?"*
Pepe accepted his drink, beaming. He nodded as he put
it to his lips. Overhead, the dull rumble of the jet-sound
died gradually away. A taxicab crossed the Rue Flamel at
the next corner. Blowing fallen leaves made faint whispering
sounds on the pavement.
"Pues?" said Pepe. He put down his glass. "What of it?"
"That's a freak," said Harrison. "But I just found in Cuvier's
notesthe naturalist, you knowthat in 1804 a man named
de Bassompierre wrote him a theory which might be of in-
terest to a savant concerned with natural history. And he out-
lined, very clearly and simply, the Mendelian laws of heredity.
But it happened to be more than half a century before Mendel
discovered them."
Pepe said, "That is not a freak?"
"No," said Harrison with some grimness. "Last week I
found in the laboratory notes of Amperethe man who dis-
covered so much about electricity, you knowthat someone
named de Bassompierre wrote him in 1805 to tell him very
respectfully that there were such things as alternating cur-
rents. He explained in words of one syllable how they could
be generated and what they could be used for."
Pepe raised his eyebrows.
"This Bassompierre," he observed, "was quite a character!
You interest me strangely. In tact . . ."
"He was more than a character," said Harrison. "He
wrote to Laplace, the astronomer, assuring him that Mars
had two moons, very small and very close to its surface. He
also said that there were three planets beyond Saturn, and
that the one next out had a period of eighty-four years and
two moons, one retrograde. He suggested that it should be
called Uranus. He added that in the year 1808 there would be
a nova in Persis, (which there was!) and he signed himself
very respectfully, de Bassompierre."