"Blish, James - Common Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

intellectual agony, with its glandular counterpoint, had come
to nothing. Garrard was now keeping ship-time.
Garrard sat back down on the hammock, uncertain whether
to be bitter or relieved. Neither emotion satisfied him in the
end; he simply felt unsatisfied. Micro-time had been bad
enough while it lasted; but now it was gone, and everything
seemed normal. How could so transient a thing have killed
Brown and Cellini? They were stable men, more stable, by
his own private estimation, than Garrard himself. Yet he had
come through it. Was there more to it than this?
And if there waswhat, conceivably, could it be?
There was no answer. At his elbow, on the control chassis
which he had thrust aside during that first moment of
infinitely protracted panic, the calendar continued to tick.
The engine noise was gone. His breath came and went in
natural rhythm. He felt light and strong. The ship was quiet,
calm, unchanging.
The calendar ticked, faster and faster. It reached and
passed the first hour, ship-time, of flight in overdrive.
Pock.
Garrard looked up in surprise. The familiar noise, this
time, had been the hour-hand jumping one unit. The minute-
hand was already sweeping past the past half-hour. The
second-hand was whirling like a propellerand while he
watched it, it speeded up to complete invisibility
Pock.
Another hour. The half-hour already passed. Pock. An-
other hour. Pock. Another. Pock. Pock. Pock, Pock, Pock,
Pock, pck-pck-pck-pck-pckpckpckpck. . . .
The hands of the calendar swirled toward invisibility as
time ran away with Garrard. Yet the ship did not change.
It stayed there, rigid, inviolate, invulnerable. When the date
tumblers reached a speed at which Garrard could no longer
read them, he discovered that once more he could not move
and that, although his whole body seemed to be aflutter
like that of a hummingbird, nothing coherent was coming
to him through his senses. The room was dimming, becoming
redder; or no, it was . . .
But he never saw the end of the process, never was
allowed to ' look from the pinnacle of macro-time toward
which the Haertel overdrive was taking him.
Pseudo-death took him first.
3
That Garrard did not die completely, and within a com-
paratively short time after the DFC-3 had gone into overdrive,
was due to the purest of accidents; but Garrard did not know
that. In fact, he knew nothing at all for an indefinite period,
sitting rigid and staring, his metabolism slowed down to next
to nothing, his mind almost utterly inactive. From time to
time, a single wave of low-level metabolic activity passed