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

lie within the grasp of man's understanding. Wasn't that the
ultimate secret, to be able to understand the flux in which
existence is staged, as a dream is staged in the primitive
reaches of the mind?
And But Would not that day bring the annihilation of
Earth's local time? That was what he had started. It could
only mean that local time' was not a product of planetary
elements; there the writer of the Scientific American article
had not dared to go far enough; local time was entirely a
product of the psyche. That dark innermost thing that could
keep accurate time even while a man lay unconscious was a
mere provincial; but it could be educated to be a citizen of the
universe. He saw that he was the first of a new race,
unimaginable in the wildest mind a few months previously.
He was independent of the enemy that, more than Death,
menaced contemporary man: Time. Locked within him was
an entirety new potential. Superman had arrived.
Painfully, Superman stirred in his seat. He sat so wrapt for
so long that his limbs grew stiff and dead without his noticing
it.

Universal thoughts may occur if one times carefully enough
one's circumbendibus about a given table
"Dictation," he said, and waited impatiently until the com-
mand had penetrated backwards to the limbo by the fire
where Stackpole sat. What he had to say was so terribly
importantyet it had to wait on these people. . . .
As was his custom, he rose and began to walk round the
table, speaking in phrases quickly delivered. This was to be
the testament to the new way of life. . . .
"Consciousness is not expendable but concurrent. ... There
may have been many time nodes at the beginning of the
human race.... The mentally deranged often revert to
different time rates. For some, a day seems to stretch on for
ever.... We know by experience that for children time is
seen in the convex mirror of consciousness, enlarged and
distorted beyond its focal point...." He was momentarily
irritated by the scared face of his wife appearing outside the
study window, but he brushed it away and continued.
". . . its focal point. . . . Yet man in his ignorance has
persisted in pretending time was some sort of uni-directional
flow, and homogenous at that . . . despite the evidence to the
contrary. . . . Our conception of ourselvesno, this erroneous
conception has become a basic life assumption. . . ."
Daughters of daughters
Westermark's mother was not given to metaphysical specu-
lation, but as she was leaving the room, she turned and said to
her daughter-in-law, "You know what I sometimes think?
Jack is so strange, I wonder at nights if men and women
aren't getting more and more apart in thought and in their