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

a vessel of horror. When some few trickles of reason began
to return over that burning desert of reasonless emotion, he
found that he was sitting up on the cushions, and that with
one arm he had thrust the control chassis back on its elbow
so that it no longer jutted over his body. His clothing was
wet with perspiration, which stubbornly refused to evaporate
or to cool him. And his lungs ached a little, although he could
still detect no breathing.
What under God had happened? Was it this that had killed
Brown and Cellini? For it would kill Garrard, tooof that
he was sure, if it happened often. It would kill him even if it
happened only twice more, if the next two such things fol-
lowed the first one closely. At the very best it would make a
slobbering idiot of him; and though the computer might bring
Garrard and the ship back to Earth, it would not be able to
tell the Project about this tornado of senseless fear.
The calendar said that the eternity in hell had taken three
seconds. As he looked at it in academic indignation, it said
pock and condescended to make the total seizure four sec-
onds long. With grim determination, Garrard began to count
again.
He took care to establish the counting as an absolutely
even, automatic process which would not stop at the back of
his mind no matter what other problem he tackled along
with it, or what emotional typhoons should interrupt him.
Really compulsive counting cannot be stopped by anything
not the transports of love nor the agonies of empires. Garrard
knew the dangers in deliberately setting up such a mechanism
in his mind, but he also knew how desperately he needed to
time that clock tick. He was beginning to understand what
had happened to himbut he needed exact measurement
before he could put that understanding to use.
Of course there had been plenty of speculation on the
possible effect of the overdrive on the subjective time of the
pilot, but none of it had come to much. At any speed below
the velocity of light, subjective and objective time were
exactly the same as far as the pilot was concerned. For an
observer on Earth, time aboard the ship would appear to be
vastly slowed at near-light speeds; but for the pilot himself
there would be no apparent change.
Since flight beyond the speed of light was impossible
although for slightly differing reasonsby both the current
theories of relativity, neither theory had offered any clue as
to what would happen on board a translight ship. They would
not allow that any such ship could even exist. The Haertel
transformation, on which, in effect, the DFC-3 flew, was
nonrelativistic: it showed that the apparent elapsed time of a
translight journey should be identical in ship-time, and in the
time of observers at both ends of the trip.
But since ship and pilot were part of the same system,