"L. Sprague De Camp - Aristotle and the Gun" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

Flower Moon 3,

To:

Messire Markos Koukidas
Consulate of the Balkan Commonwealth
Kataapa, Muskhogian Federation

My dear Consul:

You have no doubt heard of our glorious victory at Ptaksit, when our
noble Sachim destroyed the armored chivalry of the Mengwe by the brilliant
use of pikemen and archery. (I suggested it to him years ago but never
mind.) Sagoyewatha and most of his Senecas fell, and the Oneidas broke
before our countercharge. The envoys from the Grand Council of the Long
House arrive tomorrow for a peace-pauwau. The roads to the South are
open again, so I send you my long-promised account of the events that
brought me from my own world into this one.

If you could have stayed longer on your last visit, I think I could have
made the matter clear, despite the language difficulty and my hardness of
hearing. But perhaps, if I give you a simple narrative, in the order in which
things happened to me, truth will transpire.

Know, then, that I was born into a world that looks like this on the map,
but is very different as regards human affairs. I tried to tell you of some of
the triumphs of our natural philosophers, of our machines and discoveries.
No doubt you thought me a first-class liar, though you were too polite to say
so.

Nonetheless, my tale is true, though for reasons that will appear I
cannot prove it. I was one of those natural philosophers. I commanded a
group of younger philosophers, engaged in a task called a project, at a
center of learning named Brookhaven, on the south shore of Sewanhaki
twenty parasangs east of Paumanok. Paumanok itself was known as
Brooklyn, and formed part of an even larger city called New York.

My project had to do with the study of space-time. (Never mind what
that means but read on.) At this center we had learned to get vast amounts
of power from sea water by what we called a fusion process. By this
process we could concentrate so much power in a small space that we
could warp the entity called space-time and cause things to travel in time as
our other machines traveled in space.

When our calculations showed that we could theoretically hurl an
object back in time, we began to build a machine for testing this hypothesis.
First we built a small pilot model. In this we sent small objects back in time
for short periods.

We began with inanimate objects. Then we found that a rabbit or rat