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

and the ship is gone. He turns back again until he finds it standing out under light canvas past Sandy
Hook. Manipulating time and space controls at once, be follows it eastward through a nickering of storm
and sunтАФloses it, finds it again, counting days as he goes. The farther eastward, the more he has to tilt
the device downward, while the image of the ship tilts correspondingly away from him. Because of the
angle, he can no longer keep the ship in view from a distance but must track it closely. November 21 and
22, violent storms: the ship is dashed upward by waves, falls again, visible only intermittently; it takes him
five hours to pass through two days of real time. The 23rd is calmer, but on the 24th another storm blows
up. Smith rubs his eyes, loses the ship, finds it again after a ten-minute search.
 The gale blows itself out on the morning of the 26th. The sun is bright, the sea almost dead calm.
Smith is able to catch glimpses of figures on deck, tilted above dark cross-sections of the hull. A sailor is
splicing a rope in the stem, two others lowering a triangular sail between the foremast and the bowsprit,
and a fourth is at the helm. A little group stands leaning on the starboard rail; one of them is a woman.
The next glimpse is that of a running figure who advances into the screen and disappears. Now the men
are lowering a boat over the side; the rail has been removed and lies on the deck. The men drop into the
boat and row away. He hears them shouting to each other but cannot make out the words.
Smith turns to the ship again: the deck is empty. He dips below to look at the hold, filled with casks,
then the cabin, then the forecastle.
There is no sign of anything wrongтАФno explosion, no fire, no trace of violence. When he looks up
again, he sees the sails flapping, then bellying out full. The sea is rising. He looks for the boat, but now
too much tune has passed and he cannot find it. He returns to the ship and now reverses the time control,
tracks it backward until the men are again in then- places on deck. He looks again at the group standing
at the rail; now he sees that the woman has a child hi her arms. The child struggles, drops over the rail.
Smith hears the woman shriek. In a moment she too is over the rail and falling into the sea.
He watches the men running, sees them launch the boat As they pull away, he is able to keep the
focus near enough to see and hear them. One calls, "My God, who's at the helm?" Another, a bearded
man with a face gone tallow-pale, replies, "Never mindтАФrow!" They are staring down into the sea. After
a moment one looks up, then another. The Mary Celeste, with three of the four sails on her foremast set,
is gliding away, slowly, now faster; now she is gone.
Smith does not run through the scene again to watch the child and her mother drown, but others do.
The production model was ready for shipping hi September. It was a simplified version of the
prototype, with only two controls, one for space, one for time. The range of the device was limited to
one thousand miles. Nowhere on the casing of the device or in the instruction booklet was a patent
number or a pending patent mentioned. Smith had called the device Ozo, perhaps because he thought it
sounded vaguely Japanese. The booklet described the device as a distant viewer and gave clear, simple
instructions for its use. One sentence read cryptically: "Keep Time Control set at zero." It was like "Wet
Paint-Do Not Touch."
During the week of September 23, seven thousand Ozos were shipped to domestic and Canadian
addresses supplied by Smith: five hundred to electronics manufacturers and suppliers, six thousand, thirty
to a carton, marked "On Consignment," to TV outlets in major cities, and the rest to private citizens
chosen at random. The instruction booklets were in sealed envelopes packed with each device. Three
thousand more went to Europe, South and Central America, and the Middle East.
A few of the outlets which received the cartons opened them the same day, tried the devices out, and
put them on sale at prices ranging from $49.95 to $125. By the following day the word was beginning to
spread, and by the close of business on the third day every store was sold out. Most people who got
them, either through the mail or by purchase, used them to spy on their neighbors and on people in hotels.
In a house in Cleveland, a man watches his brother-in-law in the next room, who is watching his wife
getting out of a taxi. She goes into the lobby of an apartment building. The husband watches as she gets
into the elevator, rides to the fourth floor. She rings the bell beside the door marked 410. The door
opens; a dark-haired man takes her in his arms; they kiss.
The brother-in-law meets him in the hall. "Don't do it, Charlie."