"Chronicles of Chaos 01 - Orphans of Chaos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wright John C)

He said, "Picture this. According to relativity, objects compress in the direction of motion, right? And yet it also says that the same objects and events appear from each other's 'frames of reference' to be symmetrical, right?"
"Right."
'Take a cup with a tight-fitting lid. The cup and lid fit together, correct? Now move the lid and cup away at right angles, the lid horizontally, the cup vertically. Got the picture?"
"Got it."
"What happened when you bring the lid and cup back to-gether at near light speed?"
"Um... I am sure you are about to tell me ..."
"From the point of view of the lid, the cup is compressed in its direction of motion, horizontally. The cup is shorter, but still a cylinder. The lid, to itself, suffers no distortion, of course. When the two meet, the lid will fit on the cup. But from the point of view of the cup, the lid is foreshortened in its direction of motion, vertically. Which means the lid is now an oval. The cup still appears round to itself. When the two meet, the lid cannot fit on the cup. The same event has two different results from two different points of view."
I looked at him sidelong, wondering if he were kidding. For the first time, I wondered whether other people have more trouble visually picturing things in their imagination than I did. I mean, it is not as if I could look into their heads to see.
I opened my mouth to say that both observers would see the motion vector as a diagonal, but then I closed it again. I did not like arguing with Victor.
"What in particular happened?" I said.
For a moment I thought he was going to ask me what I meant, but then he said, "You know Mrs. Lilac from the village, whom Mrs. Wren uses to carry burdens and packages when she has done too much shopping?"
"Sort of the way you do me," I said archly. I had carried the equipment up the slope from the hedges behind the lab shed.
"I don't see the analogy."
"Go on witii your story."
"Mrs. Lilac passed me in the hall. She said her daughter Lily was going to graduate from upper school soon and, seeing as how I had helped Lily learn her letters when she was in grammar school, would I care to attend the graduation ceremony? You know who Lily is, don't you?"
"Yes. I know who she is," I said shordy.
I was thinking that Victor had been to see Lily Lilac on every occasion that the Headmaster would allow. She was fair haired and fine boned, with a breezy, insincere manner I found exasperating.
Her father owned the fish cannery, and was counted as being one of the more influential people, among the working class, in town. Lily owned her own outboard motor, and she went boat-ing on every possible occasion.
From time to time I had seen Victor watching Lily Lilac from the sea cliff. He would stand among the rocks with a telescope, and watch her fly by, her boat bouncing along the waters of the bay, her blond hair bouncing in the wind. She was always with a different boy each time. She seemed to be able to do what she liked, and go where she liked, when she liked. I do not recall hating any other living being so fiercely.
"I know her," I said with a sniff. "So you've been invited to a graduation. I doubt Headmaster will allow you off the grounds." I remember I was being fiercely loyal to Headmaster Boggin in those days, and thought he could do no wrong. Victor favored me with another one of his withering glances.
"What?" I said. "What?"
"Logic. How young do you think a person has to be to not know her letters and numbers? And I must have been old enough to know mine. Let's assume I was unduly precocious, and she was unduly slow."
"Yes, let's do," I said, perhaps with a note of venom in my voice.
"I could have been what, three? Have you ever heard a child know his letters at two? How late could she live and not know her letters? Let's say five. She would be nineteen when she graduated. If she skipped a grade, eighteen. That makes me how old now?"
"Fifteen."
"But suppose the numbers were reversed. What if I had been around five when I taught a two- or three-year-old? How old does that make me?"
I said, "If you were twenty-and-one, you'd be an adult. They would have let you out of here. They'd have let you out three years ago."
"Would they have?"
"Why would they keep you?"
"Perhaps they get money from the trust for my upkeep. Who knows?"
"But how could they tell such a lie, and not get caught?"
"Who is to catch them? The townspeople are afraid of the Headmaster."
The idea that anyone could be "afraid" of the kindly old headmaster, with his gentle smile and mild humor, was beyond belief. Had it been anyone other than Victor, I would have laughed aloud.
But I didn't laugh. "Someone would tell. They can't just go on keeping us here forever."
"Who is to tell?" he said. "Who will question their statements? Suppose they say I am fifteen. Don't I look it? Who questions them? Who doubts them? Who is skeptical enough to go to the trouble to check?"
At that moment, a timer on the instrument bleeped.
Victor leaned in and looked at the eyepiece. He clicked the red button with his thumb. A moment later the LED readout lit up. 3.3214... He said grimly, "The difference between the reading now and the reading at dusk is merely the angular momentum of the turning of the Earth. Light shot forward, tangentially to the turn, has the velocity of the Earth added, and travels faster. Light shot at a right angle, away from the axis, has no velocity added, and is slower. If we wait till dawn, the component of Earth's rotation will be subtracted, and the velocity will be slower yet."
"There must be a mistake," I said slowly. 'The instrument must be off."
"Is that the most reasonable explanation?"
He turned and squinted. The light in the boys' batiiroom off me dormitory was flickering off and on, off and on. That was the signal that Mr. Glum had been seen leaving his little house on the back grounds, no doubt to pull a surprise inspection of the boys' dorm.
There was no light in the girls' bathroom. Either Mrs. Wren had not stirred and the girls' dorm was safe, or else Vanity had fallen asleep at her post.
Victor stood. "I must run. Don't let the equipment get damaged when you carry it back down the rocks."
"Yes, master," I said sarcastically. But he did not hear me, be-cause he was already jogging down-slope.
Now I was alone, in the cold, with no one but the moon to look after me.
Well, there was no need to delay. I started doing, in my mind, that trick I had learned that made all burdens seem lighter than they were when I hoisted them, and I put my hands out toward the instrument.
I was thinking: it was impossible.
The angular momentum of the Earth's rotation was so small a fraction of the speed of light, I know, that no possible instru-ment could detect a difference; and surely not a difference of nearly half a second over the (relatively) short distance between Earth and Moon. To be a valid experiment, the second reading would have to be taken half a month later, not half a day later, so that the velocity component added would have been that of the Earth's motion around me sun.
So, instead of lifting the instrument just yet, I put my eye to the eyepiece, made sure the instrument was still centered on the same crater of the moon as it had been at dusk, reached, and hit the red switch.
The dish hummed as a radar beam was sent out, bounced off me moon, came back.
The LED readout lit up. 2.8955.