"Bradbury, Ray & Hasse, Harry - The Pendulum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

"He's finished already!"
"We shall soon know the story...."
The bird creatures fairly quivered as Orfleew appeared in the open doorway of
their spaceship, carefully carrying a sheaf of yellowed pages. He waved to them,
spread his wings and soared outward. A moment later he alighted beside his
companions on their narrow perch.
"The language is simple," Orfleew told them, "and the story is a sad one. I will
read it to you and then we must depart, for there is nothing we can do on this
world."
They edged closer to him there on the metal strand, eagerly awaiting the first
words. The pendulum hung very straight and very still on a windless world, the
transparent head only a few feet above the plaza floor. The grinning skull still
peered out as though hugely amused or hugely satisfied. Orfleew took one more
fleeting look at it . . . then he opened the crumbling notebook and began to
read.
MY NAME John Layeville. I am known as "The Prisoner of Time." People, tourists
from all over the world, come to look at me in my swinging pendulum. School
children, on the electrically moving sidewalks surrounding the plaza, stare at
me in childish awe. Scientists, studying me, stand out there and train their
instruments on the swinging pendulum head. Oh, they could stop the swinging,
they could release me--but now I know that will never happen. This all began as
a punishment for me, but now I am an enigma to science. I seem to be immortal.
It is ironic.
A punishment for me! Now, as through a mist, my memory spins back to the day
when all this started. I remember I had found a way to bridge time gaps and
travel into futurity. I remember the time device I built. No, it did not in any
way resemble this pendulum--my device was merely a huge box-like affair of
specially treated metal and glassite, with a series of electric rotors of my own
design which set up conflicting, but orderly, fields of stress. I had tested it
to perfection no less than three times, but none of the others in the Council of
Scientists would believe me. They all laughed. And Leske laughed. Especially
Leske, for he has always hated me.
I offered to demonstrate, to prove. I invited the Council to bring others--all
the greatest minds in the scientific world. At last, anticipating an amusing
evening at my expense, they agreed.
I shall never forget that evening when a hundred of the world's greatest
scientists gathered in the main Council laboratory. But they had come to jeer,
not to cheer. I did not care, as I stood on the platform beside my ponderous
machine and listened to the amused murmur of voices. Nor did I care that
miliions of other unbelieving eyes were watching by television, Leske having
indulged in a campaign of mockery against the possibility of time travel. I did
not care, because I knew that in a few minutes Leske's campaign would be turned
into victory for me. I would set my rotors humming, I would pull the control
switch--and my machine would flash away into a time dimension and back again, as
I had already seen it do three times. Later we would send a man out in the
machine.
The moment arrived. But fate had decreed it was to be my moment of doom.
Something went wrong, even now I do not know what or why. Perhaps the television
concentration in the room affected the stress of the time-fields my rotors set
up. The last thing I remember seeing, as I reached out and touched the main