"Jack Williamson - The Legion of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

X IN SORAINYA'S CITADEL......61

XI BEYOND THE DIAMOND THRONE . . .67
XII THE SECRET OF THE BRICK . . . .74

XIII SEED OF FUTURITY...... . 78

XIV SORAINYA'S Kiss........83

XV THE SILVER TUBE.......87

XVI RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY .... 91

XVII WORLDS THAT NEVER WERE . . . .98

THE LEGION OF TIME
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THE BEGINNING OF IT, for Dennis Lanning—the very beginning of his life—was on a hushed April evening of 1927.
Then eighteen, Lanning was slender and almost delicately featured, with straw-yellow hair which usually stood on
end. He usually wore a diffident smile; but his gray eyes could light with a fighting glint, and his wiry body held a
quick and unsuspected strength.

In that beginning was the same fantastic contrast that ran through the whole adventure: the mingling of everyday
reality with the stark Inexplicable.

Lanning, that last term, shared a Cambridge apartment with three other Harvard seniors, all a year or two older. Wilmot
McLan, the mathematician, was a lean grave man, already absorbed in his work. Lap Meng Shan, proud but
soft-spoken son of a mandarin of Szechwan, was eagerly drinking in the wonders of modern engineering. Good friends
and swell fellows, both. But the one who stood closest to Lanning was Barry Halloran.

Gigantic red-haired All American tackle, Barry was first and last a fighter. Some stern bright spirit of eternal rebellion he
and Lanning shared together. That spring the sky was still an exciting frontier, and they were taking flying lessons at
the East Boston airport.

All three were out, however, on this drowsy Sunday evening. The house was still, and Lanning sat alone in his room,
reading a thin little gray-bound book. It was Wilmont McLan's first scientific work, just published at his own expense.
Reality and Change, he had called it, and this copy was inscribed, "To Denny, from Wil—a stitch in time."

Its mathematics was a new language to Lanning. He leaned back in his chair, with tired eyes closed, trying to

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10 The Legion of Time

form some clear picture from the mist of abstruse symbols. McLan had quoted the famous words of Minkowski:
"Space in itself and time in itself sink to mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two retains an independent
existence." If time, then, were simply another extension of the universe, was tomorrow as real as yesterday? If one
could leap forward—

"Denny Lanning!"