"Campbell, John W Jr - The Last Evolution" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

it twisted and bent, and yet was not hurt. In awful wonder those Outsiders saw the ship turned inside out, and yet it was whole, and no part damaged. They saw the ship restored, and its great screen of blankness out, protecting it from all known rays. The ship twisted, and what they knew were curves, yet were lines, and angles that were acute, were somehow straight lines. Half mad with horror, they saw the sphere send out a beam of blue-white radiance, and it passed easily through that screen, and through the ship, and all energies within it were instantly locked. They could not be changed; it could be neither warmed nor cooled; what was open could not be shut, and what was shut could not be opened. All things were immovable and unchangeable for all time. "Go, and do not return."
The Outsiders left, going out across the void, and they have not returned, though five Great Yean, have passed, being a period of approximately one hundred and twenty-five thousand of the lesser years-a measure no longer used, for it is very brief. And now I can say that that statement I made to Roal and Trest so very long ago is true, and what he said was true, for the Last Evolution has taken place, and things of pure force and pure intelligence in their countless millions are on those planets and in this System, and I, first of machines to use the Ultimate Energy of annihilating matter, am also the last, and this record being finished, it is to be given unto the forces of one of those force-intelligences, and carried back through the past, and returned to the Earth of long ago.
And so my task being done, I, F-2, like Real and Trest, shall follow the others of my kind into eternal oblivion, for my kind is now, and theirs was, poor and inefficient. Time has worn me, and oxidation attacked me, but they of Force are eternal, and omniscient.
This I have treated as fictitious. Better !io-for man is an animal to whom hope is as necessary 35 food and air. Yet this which is made of excerpts from lertain records on thin sheets of metal is no fiction, and it seems I must so say.
It seems now, when I know this that is to be, that it
must be so, for machines are indeed better than man, whether being of Metal, or being of Force.
So, you who have read, believe as you will. Then think-and maybe, you will change your belief.