"Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

But, well-endowed as Mrs. Rumfoord was, she still did troubled things like chaining a dog's
skeleton to the wall, like having the gates of the estate bricked up, like letting the famous formal
gardens turn into New England jungle.
The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent aren't everything.
Malachi Constant, the richest American, locked the Alice-in-Wonderland door behind him. He
hung his dark glasses and false beard on the ivy of the wall. He passed the dog's skeleton briskly,
looking at his solar-powered watch as he did so. In seven minutes, a live mastiff named Kazak
would materialize and roam the grounds.
"Kazak bites," Mrs. Rumfoord had said in her invitation, "so please be punctual."
Constant smiled at that — the warning to be punctual. To be punctual meant to exist as a
point, meant that as well as to arrive somewhere on time. Constant existed as a point — could
not imagine what it would, be like to exist in any other way.
That was one of the things he was going to find out — what it was like to exist in any other
way. Mrs. Rumford's husband existed in another way.
Winston Niles Rumfoord had run his private space ship right into the heart of an uncharted
chrono-synclastic infundibulum two days out of Mars. Only his dog had been along. Now
Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog Kazak existed as wave phenomena — apparently pulsing
in a distorted spiral with its origin in the Sun and its terminal in Betelgeuse.
The earth was about to intercept that spiral.

Almost any brief explanation of chrono-synclastic infundibula is certain to be offensive to
specialists in the field. Be that as it may, the best brief explanation is probably that of Dr. Cyril
Hall, which appears in the fourteenth edition of A Child's Cyclopedia of Wonders and Things to
Do. The article is here reproduced in full, with gradous permission from the publishers:
CHRONO-SYNCLASTIC INFUNDIBULA — Just imagine that your Daddy is the smartest man
who ever lived on Earth, and he knows everything there is to find out, and he is exactly right
about everything, and he can prove he is right about everything. Now imagine another little child
on some nice world a million light years away, and that little child's Daddy is the smartest man
who ever lived on that nice world so far away. And he is just as smart and just as right as your
Daddy is. Both Daddies are smart, and both Daddies are right.
Only if they ever met each other they would get into a terrible argument, because they
wouldn't agree on anything. Now, you can say that your Daddy is right and the other little child's
Daddy is wrong, but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot
of people to be right about things and still not agree.
The reason both Daddies can be right and still get into terrible fights is because there are so
many different ways of being right. There are places in the Universe, though, where each Daddy
could finally catch on to what the other Daddy was talking about. These places are where all the
different kinds of truths fit together as nicely as the parts in your Daddy's solar watch. We call
these places chrono-synclastic infundibula.
The Solar System seems to be full of chrono-synclastic infundibula. There is one great big one
we are sure of that likes to stay between Earth and Mars. We know about that one because an
Earth man and his Earth dog ran right into it.
You might think it would be nice to go to a chrono-synclastic infundibulum and see all the
different ways to be absolutely right, but it is a very dangerous thing to do. The poor man and his
poor dog are scattered far and wide, not just through space, but through time, too.
Chrono (kroh-no) means time. Synclastic (sin-class-tick) means curved toward the same side
in all directions, like the skin of an orange. Infundibulum (in-fun-dib-u-lum) is what the ancient
Romans like Julius Caesar and Nero called a funnel. If you don't know what a funnel is, get
Mommy to show you one.