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

"Get out of my way."
"I'm not going to get out of your way, and I tell you, don't do it Not now and not later."
"Why the hell shouldn't I?тАЭ
"Because if you do I'll kill you. If you want a divorce, OK, get a divorce. But don't lay a hand on her
or I'll find you the farthest place you can go."
Smith got his consignment of Ozos early in the week, took one home and left it to his store manager
to put a price on the rest He did not bother to use the production model but began at once to build
another prototype. It had controls calibrated to one-hundredth of a second and one millimeter, and a
timer that would allow him to stop a scene, or advance or regress it at any desired rate. He ordered
some clockwork from an astronomical supply house.
A high-ranking officer in Army Intelligence, watching the first demonstration of the Ozo in the
Pentagon, exclaimed, "My God, with this we could dismantle half the establishmentтАФall we've got to do
is launch interceptors when we see them push the button."
"It's a good thing Senator Burkhart can't hear you say that" said another officer. But by the next
afternoon everybody had heard it.
A Baptist minister in Louisville led the first mob against an Ozo assembly plant. A month later, while
civil and criminal suits against all the rioters were still pending, tapes showing each one of them in
compromising or ludicrous activities were widely distributed in the press.
The commission agents who had handled the orders for the first Ozo were found out and had to
leave town. Factories were fire-bombed, but others took their place.
The first Ozo was smuggled into the Soviet Union from West Germany by Katerina Belov, a member
of a dissident group in Moscow, who used it to document illegal government actions. The device was
seized on December 13 by the KGB; Belov and two other members of the group were arrested,
imprisoned and tortured. By that time over forty other Ozos were in the hands of dissidents.
You are watching an old movie, Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice. The humor seems infantile and
unimaginative to you; you are not interested in the actresses' occasional semi-nudity. What strikes you as
hilarious is the coyness, the sidelong glances, smiles, grimaces hinting at things that will never be shown on
the screen. You realize that these people have never seen anyone but their most intimate friends without
clothing, have never seen any adult shit or piss, and would be embarrassed or disgusted if they did. Why
did children say "pee-pee" and "poo-poo," and then giggle? Yon have read scholarly books about taboos
on "bodily functions,'' but why was shitting worse than sneezing?
Cora Zickwolfe, who lived in a remote rural area of Arizona and whose husband commuted to
Tucson, arranged with her nearest neighbor, Phyllis Moll, for each of them to keep an Ozo focused on
the bulletin board in the other's kitchen. On the bulletin board was a note that said "OK." If there was any
trouble and she couldn't get to the phone, she would take down the note, or if she had time, write
another.
In April 1992, about the time her husband usually got home, an intruder broke into the house and
seized Mrs. Zickwolfe before she had time to get to the bulletin board. He dragged her into the bedroom
and forced her to disrobe. The state troopers got there hi fifteen minutes, and Cora never spoke to her
friend Phyllis again.
Between 1992 and 2002 more than six hundred improvements and supplements to the Ozo were
recorded. The most important of these was the power system created by focusing the Ozo at a narrow
aperture on the interior of the Sun. Others included the system of satellite slave units in stationary orbits
and a computerized tracer device which would keep the Ozo focused on any subject.
Using the tracer, an entomologist in Mexico City is following the ancestral line of a honey bee. The
images bloom and expire, ten every second: the tracer is following each queen back to the egg, men the
egg to the queen that laid it, then that queen to the egg. Tens of thousands of generations have passed; in
two thousand hours, beginning with a Paleocene bee, he has traveled back into the Cretaceous. He stops
at intervals to follow the bee in real time, then accelerates again. The hive is growing smaller, more
primitive. Now it is only a cluster of round cells, and the bee is different, more like a wasp. His year's