"C. L. Moore - Miracle in Three Dimensions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

Miracle in Three Dimensions
by C. L. MOORE
Photography and Sound Recording Are Bound by a Man-made Limit—and Beyond that Lies
Madness!



An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.
Notes



“I’VE got it, Abe! It’s as near to life itself as the movies will ever come. I’ve done it!” Blair
O’Byrne’s haunted black eyes were bright with triumph.
Abe Silvers, gaunt and dark and weary-eyed, shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth and
stepped in under the doorway that made sharp division between the glare of California sunlight outside
and the lofty shadows of O’Byrne’s long, dim studio.
“I hope you’re right,” he said around the cigar. “I’ve waited a long time for it. And God knows
you’ve spent more years than you ought, and more money than even you could afford. Why have you
done it, Blair? A man with your money, your background, shutting yourself up here in the dark, sweating
over shadows?”
“I haven’t been shut up away from life—I’ve been shut in with it!” O’Byrne’s smile spread across the
pallor of his delicate face. “It’s life itself I’ve been groping after all these years, and I’ve found it, Abe.
I’ve got it!”
“Got the illusion of it, maybe. A little better than Metro-Cosmic has been filming for the last few
years. And if it’s as good as you say we’ll buy it—and so what?”
O’Byrne turned to him fiercely, his dream-haunted eyes suddenly blazing.
“I tell you this is life! As near as shadows can come—too near, perhaps. ‘Moving pictures’! They’ll
have to find a new name for what I’ve got. It isn’t pictures—it’s breathing, living reality. I’ve worked
over it until nothing else seemed to matter, nothing else seemed real. I’ve got it, Abe. It’s—life.”


ABE SILVERS shifted the cigar back across his mouth, and if his eyes were understanding, his voice
was only patient. He had heard such words before, from many fiercely sincere inventors. That he had
known O’Byrne for many years did not alter his accustomed attitude toward such things.
“All right,” he murmured. “Show me. Where’s the projection room, Blair?”
“Here.” O’Byrne waved a thin, unsteady hand toward the center of the big studio where under a
battery of high-hung lights a U-shaped bar of dull silver rose from a low platform to the height of a man’s
waist. Beyond it against the wall bulked a big rectangular arrangement of chromium and glass, behind
whose face bulbs were dimly visible. Silvers snorted.
“There? That thing looks like a radio—that doubled-over pipe? But the screen, man—the
seats—the—”
“I’m telling you this is utterly new, Abe. You’ll have to clear your mind of all your preconceived ideas
of what a moving picture should be. All that is obsolete, from this minute on. The ‘moving picture’ is as
dead as the magic lantern. This is the new thing. These batteries of lights, that ‘radio’ as you call it, the
platform and bar, one for each individual spectator—”
“But what is it? What happens?”
“I can’t explain it to you now,” said O’Byrne impatiently. “For one thing, you wouldn’t believe me
until after you’ve seen it. And it would take weeks to give you enough ground-work to understand the
principles. The thing’s too complex for anyone to explain in words. I can’t even explain the appearance