"Edward L. Ferman - Best From F&SF, 23rd Edition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ferman Edward L)

wings, settles on a branch. With your own eyes now you can see Bruce, only a dot of blue beyond the
gray shake walls of the houses. In the viewer, he is turning toward you, and you duck again. Another
voice: "Children, come in and get washed for dinner now."
"Aw, Aunt Ellie!"
"Mom, we're playing hide and seek. Can't we just stay fifteen minutes more?"
 "Please, Aunt Ellie!"
"No, come on in nowтАФyou'll have plenty of time after dinner."
And Brace: "Aw, okay. All cut's in free." And once more they have not found you; your secret place
is yours alone.
Call him Smith. He was the president of a company that bore his name and which held more than a
hundred patents in the scientific instrument field. He was sixty, a widower. His only daughter and her
husband had been killed in a plane crash in 1978. He had a partner who handled the business operations
now; Smith spent most of his time in his own lab. In the spring of 1990 he was working on an
image-intensification device that was puzzling because it was too good. He had it on his bench now,
aimed at a deep shadow box across the room; at the back of the box was a card ruled with black, green,
red and blue lines. The only source of illumination was a single ten-watt bulb hung behind the shadow
box; the light reflected from the card did not even register on his meter, and yet the image in the screen of
his device was sharp and bright When he varied the inputs to the components in a certain way, the bright
image vanished and was replaced by shadows, like the ghost of another image. He had monitored every
television channel, had shielded the device against radio frequencies, and the ghosts remained. Increasing
the illumination did not make them clearer. They were vaguely rectilinear shapes without any coherent
pattern. Occasionally a moving blur traveled slowly across them.
Smith made a disgusted sound. He opened the clamps that held the device and picked it up, reaching
for the power switch with his other hand. He never touched it. As he moved the device, the ghost images
had shifted; they were dancing now with the faint movements of his hand. Smith stared at them without
breathing for a moment. Holding the cord, he turned slowly. The ghost images whirled, vanished,
reappeared. He turned the other way; they whirled back.
Smith set the device down on the bench with care. His hands were shaking. He had had the thing
clamped down on the bench all the time until now. "Christ almighty, how dumb can one man get?" he
asked the empty room.
You are six, almost seven, and you are being allowed to use the big viewer for the first time. You are
perched on a cushion in the leather chair at the console; your brother, who has been showing you the
controls with a bored and superior air, has just left the room, saying, "All right, if you know so much, do
it yourself."
In fact, the controls on this machine are unfamiliar, the little viewers you have used all your life have
only one knob, for nearer or fartherтАФto move up/down, or left/right, you just point the viewer where you
want to see. This machine has dials and little windows with numbers in them, and switches and
pushbuttons, most of which you don't understand, but you know they are for special purposes and don't
matter. The main control is a metal rod, right in front of you, with a gray plastic knob on the top. The
knob is dull from years of handling; it feels warm and a little greasy in your hand. The console has a funny
electric smell, but the big screen, taller than you are, is silent and dark. You can feel your heart beating
against your breastbone. You grip the knob harder, push it forward just a little. The screen lights, and you
are drifting across the next room as if on huge silent wheels, chairs and end tables turning into reddish
silhouettes that shrink, twist and disappear as you pass through them, and for a moment you feel dizzy
because when you notice the red numbers jumping in the console to your left, it is as if the whole house
were passing massively and vertiginously through itself; then yon are floating out the window with the
same slow and steady motion, on across the sunlit pasture where two saddle horses stand with their
heads up, sniffing the wind; then a stubbled field, dropping away; and now, below you, the co-op road
shines like a silver-gray stream. Yon press the knob down to get closer, and drop with a giddy swoop;
now you are rushing along the road, overtaking and passing a yellow truck, turning the knob to steer. At