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

Or had it been 12,000 years? After the tricks the over-
drive had played with time, there was no way to tell what
the objective date actually was. Frantically Garrard put the
telescope into action. Where was the Earth? After 12,000
years
The Earth was there. Which, he realized swiftly, proved
nothing. The Earth had lasted for many millions of years;
12,000 years was nothing to a planet. The Moon was there,
too; both were plainly visible, on the far side of the Sun
but not too far to pick them out clearly, with the telescope
at highest power. Garrard could even see a clear sun-highlight
on the Atlantic Ocean, not far east of Greenland; evidently
the computers were bringing the DFC-3 in on the Earth
from about 23 north of the plane of the ecliptic.
The Moon, too, had not changed. He could even see on
its face the huge splash of white, mimicking the sun-high-
light on Earth's ocean, which was the magnesium hydroxide
landing beacon, which had been dusted over the Mare Va-
porum in the earliest days of space flight, with a dark spot
on its southern edge which could only be the crater Monilius.
But that again proved nothing. The Moon never changed.
A film of dust laid down by modern man on its face would
last for millenniawhat, after all, existed on the Moon to
blow it away? The Mare Vaporum beacon covered more
than 4,000 square miles; age would not dim it, nor could
man himself undo iteither accidentally, or on purposein
anything under a century. When you dust an area that large
on a world without atmosphere, it stays dusted.
He checked the stars against his charts. They hadn't
moved; why should they have, in only 12,000 years? The
pointer stars in the Dipper still pointed to Polaris. Draco,
like a fantastic bit of tape, wound between the two Bears,
and Cepheus and Cassiopeia, as it always had done. These
constellations told him only that it was spring in the northern
hemisphere of Earth.
But spring of what year?
Then, suddenly, it occurred to Garrard that he had a
method of finding the answer. The Moon causes tides in the
Earth, and action and reaction are always equal and op-
posite. The Moon cannot move things on Earth without
itself being affectedand that effect shows up in the moon's
angular momentum. The Moon's distance from the Earth
increases steadily by 0.6 inches every year. At the end of
12,000 years, it should be 600 feet farther away from the
Earth, and action and reaction are always equal and op-
Was it possible to measure? Garrard doubted it, but he
got out his ephemeris and his dividers anyhow, and took
pictures. While he worked, the Earth grew nearer. By the
time he had finished his first calculationwhich was indeci-
sive, because it allowed a margin for error greater than the