"Jack Williamson - The Humanoids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

Presently he came back to the gate, walking to push the cycle up the grade.
"Find her?" the sergeant greeted him.
He shook his head, mopping dusty sweat off his pink, worried face.
 "Then where'd she go?"
"I don't know." Ironsmith peered uneasily back down the empty road behind him. "But she's
gone."
"I kept watching." The sergeant put down a pair of binoculars. "I didn't see her anywhere.
Or anybody else, between here and Salt City." He scratched his head, and then automatically
set his cap back to the proper angle and checked the military neatness of his buttons and his tie.
"A funny thing," he concluded vehemently. "Damn funny!"
Nodding mildly, Ironsmith asked to use his telephone.
"Belle," he told the operator, "please get me Dr. Forester's office. If he isn't there yet, I want
to talk to anyone who is."
 TWO



beside his bed was about to ring, with bad news from the project. That taut
THE TELEPHONE
expectancy dragged Clay Forester out of a restless sleep, in his small white house in the shadow
of the observatory dome. He had worked too late last night at the project; a brown furriness
lined his mouth and the yellow glow of sunlight in the bedroom hurt his eyes. He turned stiffly,
reaching for the telephone.
It would be Armstrong calling, probably, with some urgent message from the Defense
Authority. Perhaps - the stark thought stiffened him - the spy Mason Horn had come back from
space with new information about the hostile activities of the Triplanet Powers. Perhaps the
teleprinters had already hammered out a Red Alert, to arm the project for interplanetary war.
Forester touched the cold telephone - and checked his hand. The instrument hadn't rung, and
probably wouldn't. That disturbed expectation was just the result of past worry, he told himself,
and no warning of additional trouble to come. Disaster, of course, was always likely enough at
the project, but he didn't believe in psychic premonitions.
Maybe the feeling had somehow resulted from the senseless discussion into which Frank
Ironsmith had drawn him yesterday, about precognition. He hadn't meant to argue; the project
left him no time to squander, and his mind was too practical, besides, to enjoy any such aimless
mathematical fantasies. All he had done was to question Ironsmith's astonishing simplification
of one difficult calculation in rhodomagnetic ballistics. The offhand explanation that Ironsmith
had casually scrawled on a paper napkin at their table in the cafeteria mounted to a complete
repudiation of all the orthodox theories of space and time. The equations looked impressive,
but Forester, mistrusting the younger man's effortless cleverness, had sputtered an incredulous
protest.
"Your own experience will tell you I'm right," the mathematician had murmured easily.
"Time really works both ways, and I'm sure you often perceive the future yourself. Not
consciously, I know; not in detail. But unconsciously, emotionally, you do. Trouble is apt to
depress you before it happens, and you're likely to feel happy before any good reason appears."
"Nonsense," Forester snorted. "You're putting the effect before the cause."
"So what?" Ironsmith grinned amiably. "The math proves that causality is actually reversible
-"
Forester hadn't listened any longer. Ironsmith was just a clerk, even though he ran the
machines in the computing section well enough. Too well, perhaps, because he always seemed
to have too much free time to spin such unprofitable paradoxes for his own amusement. But