"Barry N. Malzberg - A Galaxy Called Rome" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

thousand years of agony billowing from the hold and
surrounding her in sheets like iron; and as the master engineer,
exactly as he was when she last saw him fourteen thousand
years and two weeks ago, emerges from the console, the
machinery whirring slickly, she gasps in relief, too weak even to
respond with pleasure to the fact that in this condition of
antitime, antilight, anticausality the machinery still works. But
then it would. The machinery always works, even in this final
and most terrible of all the hard-science stories. It is not the
machinery which fails but its operators or, in extreme cases, the
cosmos.
“What's the matter?” the master engineer says.
The stupidity of this question, its naiveté and irrelevance in the
midst of the hell she has occupied, stuns Lena, but she realizes
even through the haze that the master engineer would, of

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 A Galaxy Called Rome by Barry N. Malzberg



course, come without memory of circumstances and would have
to be apprised of background. This is inevitable. Whining and
sniveling, she tells him in her old man's voice what has
happened.
“Why that's terrible!” the master engineer says. “That's really
terrible,” and lumbering to a porthole, he looks out at the Black
Galaxy, the Galaxy Called Rome, and one took at it causes him
to lock into position and then disintegrate, not because the
machinery has failed (the machinery never fails, not ultimately)
but because it has merely recreated a human substance which
could not possibly come to grips with what has been seen
outside that porthole.
Lena is left alone again, then, with the shouts of the dead
carrying forward.



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Realizing instantly what has happened to her fourteen
thousand years of perception can lead to a quicker reaction
time, if nothing else-she addresses the console again, uses the
switches and produces three more prostheses, all of them
engineers barely subsidiary to the one she has already