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

were to attempt to impart to a two-pound weight, which was
keeping ship-time, an acceleration of 14,440 ft/sec' in his
time, he'd have to exert a force of 900 pounds on it.
The point was not that it couldn't be donebut that it
would take as much effort as pushing a stalled jeep. He'd
never be able to lift that pencil with his forearm muscles
alone; he'd have to put his back into the task.
And the human body wasn't engineered to maintain
stresses of that magnitude indefinitely. Not even the most
powerful professional weight-lifter is forced to show his
prowess throughout every minute of every day.
Pock.
That was the calendar again; another second had gone by.
Or another two hours. It had certainly seemed longer than a
second, but less than two hours, too. Evidently subjective
time was an intensively recomplicated measure. Even in this
world of micro-timein which Garrard's mind, at least,
seemed to be operatinghe could make the lapses between
calendar ticks seem a little shorter by becoming actively in-
terested in some problem or other. That would help, during
the waking hours, but it would help only if the rest of hia
body were not keeping the same time as his mind. If it were
not, then he would lead an incredibly active, but perhaps not
intolerable, mental life during the many centuries of his
awake-time, and would be mercifully asleep for nearly as
long.
Both problemsthat of how much force he could exert
with his body, and how long he could hope to be asleep in
his mindemerged simultaneously into the forefront of his
consciousness while he still sat inertly on the hammock, their
terms still much muddled together. After the single tick of
the calendar, the shipor the part of it that Garrard could
see from heresettled back into complete rigidity. The sound
of the engines, too, did not seem to vary in frequency or am-
plitude, at least as far as his ears could tell. He was still not
breathing. Nothing moved, nothing changed.
It was the fact that he could still detect no motion of his
diaphragm or his rib cage that decided him at last. His body
had to be keeping ship-time, otherwise he would have blacked
out from oxygen starvation long before now. That assump-
tion explained, too, those two incredibly prolonged, seemingly
sourceless saturnalias of emotion through which he had suf-
fered: they had been nothing more nor less than the response
of his endocrine glands to the purely intellectual reactions he
had experienced earlier. He had discovered that he was not
breathing, had felt a flash of panic and had tried to sit up.
Long after his mind had forgotten those two impulses, they
had inched their way from his brain down his nerves to the
glands and muscles involved, and actual, physical panic had
supervened. When that was over, he actually was sitting up,