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

distances he was trying to checkEarth and Moon were
close enough in the telescope to permit much more accurate
measurements.
Which were, he realized wryly, quite unnecessary. The
computer had brought the DFC-3 back, not to an observed
sun or planet, but simply to a calculated point. That Earth
and Moon would not be near that point when the DFC-3 re-
turned was not an assumption that the computer could make.
That the Earth was visible from here was already good and
sufficient proof that no more time had elapsed than had been
calculated for from the beginning.
This was hardly new to Garrard; it had simply been
retired to the back of his mind. Actually he had been doing
all this figuring for one reason, and one reason only: because
deep in his brain, set to work by himself, there was a
mechanism that demanded counting. Long ago, while he
was still trying to time the ship's calendar, he had initiated
compulsive countingand it appeared that he had been
counting ever since. That had been one of the known
dangers of deliberately starting such a mental mechanism;
and now it was bearing fruit in these perfectly useless as-
tronomical exercises.
The insight was healing. He finished the figures roughly,
and that unheard moron deep inside his brain stopped count-
ing at last. It had been pawing its abacus for twenty months
now, and Garrard imagined that it was as glad to be retired
as he was to feel it go.
His radio squawked, and said anxiously, "DFC-3, DFC-3.
Garrard, do you hear me? Are you still alive? Everybody's
going wild down here. Garrard, if you hear me, call us!"
It was Haertel's voice. Garrard closed the dividers so
convulsively that one of the points nipped into the heel of
his hand. "Haertel, I'm here. DF,C-3 to the Project. This is
Garrard." And then, without knowing quite why, he added:
"With all of love."
Haertel, after all the hoopla was over, was more than
interested in the time effects. "It certainly enlarges the mani-
fold in which I was working," he said. "But I think we can
account for it in the transformation. Perhaps even factor
it out, which would eliminate it as far as the pilot is con-
cerned. We'll see, anyhow."
Garrard swirled his highball reflectively. In Haertel's
cramped old office, in the Project's administration shack, he
felt both strange and as old, as compressed, constricted. He
said, "I don't think I'd do that, Adolph. I think it saved
my life."
"How?"
"I told you that I seemed to die after a while. Since I got
home, I've been reading; and I've discovered that the psychol-
ogists take far less stock in the individuality of the human