"Aldiss, Brian W - Short Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldiss Brian W)

Where the Scientific American did not reach
Jack Westermark put down the Scientific American and
stared at the table top. With his right hand, he felt the beat of
his heart. In the magazine was an article about him, illus-
trated with photographs of him taken at the Research Hospi-
tal. This thoughtful article was far removed from the sensa-
tional pieces that had appeared elsewhere, the shallow things
that referred to him as The Man That Has Done More Than
Einstein To Wreck Our Cosmic Picture; and for that very
reason it was the more startling, and presented some aspects
of the matter that Westermark himself had not considered.
As he thought over its conclusions, he rested from the
effort of reading terrestrial books, and Stackpole sat by the
fire, smoking a cigar and waiting to take Westermark's dicta-
tion. Even reading a magazine represented a feat in space-
time, a collaboration, a conspiracy. Stackpole turned the
pages at timed intervals, Westermark read when they lay flat.
He was unable to turn them when, in their own narrow
continuum, they were not being turned; to his fingers, they lay
under the jelly-like glaze, that visual hallucination that repre-
sented an unconquerable cosmic inertia.
The inertia gave a special shine to the surface of the table
as he stared into it and probed into his own mind to
determine the truths of the Scientific American article.
The writer of the article began by considering the facts and
observing that they tended to point towards the existence of
local times' throughout the universe; and that if this were so,
a new explanation might be forthcoming for the recession of
the galaxies and different estimates arrived at for the age of
the universe (and of course for its complexity). He then
proceeded to deal with the problem that vexed other writers
on the subject; namely, why, if Westermark lost Earth time
on Mars, he had not reciprocally lost Mars time back on
Earth. This, more than anything, pointed to the fact that
local times' were not purely mechanistic but to some extent at
least a psycho-biological function.
In the table top, Westermark saw himself being asked to
travel again to Mars, to take part in a second expedition to
those continents of russet sand where the fabric of space-time
was in some mysterious and insuperable fashion 3.3077 min-
utes ahead of Earth norm. Would his interior clock leap
forward again? What then of the sheen on things earthly?
And what would be the effect of gradually drawing away
from the iron laws under which, since its scampering pleisto-
cene infancy, humankind had lived?
Impatiently he thrust his mind forward to imagine the day
when Earth harboured many local times, gleaned from
voyages across the vacancies of space; those vacancies lay
across time, too, and that little-understood concept (McTag-
gart had denied its external reality, hadn't he?) would come to