"Rex Gordon - The Time Factor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gordon Rex)

removed from round the target and that were looking strangely aged, and crystalline and powdery around
the edges.
'The time insulation,' he said. 'What else? We're working very near the edge of things. Who knows
what happens when a solid particle is speeded up ever nearer to the speed of light and begins to increase
in size and mass?'
It was Sara Francis who told me quietly.
'We know, we believe, that we get an effect in time,' she said. Across the table with its exhibits she
looked at me steadily with her intelligent, frank grey eyes. 'We did not know at first. We tried to record
the passage of the protons, or some kind of radiation, on photographic plates. The proton beam should
have punched holes right through them. Instead, we had to put in a camera to get anything at all. And
then, instead of a record of the halo we thought that we were seeing, we got strange pictures.'
I looked back at the mirrors as though I might see something there in the inhuman, forbidden area
beyond the wall.
'Pictures?'
'What do we know,' said Strassen, 'about these strange regions where particles are approaching the
speed of light? Each bigger synchrotron that is built brings solid matter near to a state that is unattainable
and impossible. You know that, Judgen? If a particle did travel at the speed of light it would transit
instantaneously. It would be in two places simultaneously and everywhere at once. It's size and mass
would then be infinite so it would be everywhere before it even started. Something must break down
before then. There is always something happens before you touch infinity. But there are only a limited
number of parameters in a field equation, and the one that cracks is time.'

CHAPTER FOUR
General Bridger was convinced by the time the lights came on.
'Come,' he said to myself and Reckman. He took us out to sit in his car.
We went out of the building and got into it. The General took the wheel himself. He dismissed his
man. But he did not turn the engine or shift the ignition switch. We just sat there, I beside him in the front
seat and Reckman in the back.
When the General did not say anything, but sat there as though he were driving at high speed to
nowhere, Reckman began to talk methodically, not saying anything it seemed, but going over the points
we already knew.
'We know it's impossible,' he said in his flat voice. 'In the laboratory they ended the experiment at half
past twelve. In the view taken from the camera in the bell-jar, the laboratory clock was showing twenty
of three by the time we lost it. By then, the bell-jar and its contents had been sent, had taken all those
pictures and come back. The experiment had been dismantled. The camera had been taken out of the
bell-jar and the film taken from the camera. Yet the record was taken of a time when the camera was not
there. All right. There was consistence. The clock and the recording instruments when they recovered
them showed an elapsed time of eight hours ten minutes. There is a logic within a logic. The pictures may
be genuine. Or the Professor may be giving us a line of hocus-pocus.'
 The General sat for a while in the car, then turned to me.
'What's your impression, Judgen? You're new and fresh to this. The Professor's synchrotron won't
work. So he produces all these pictures. Do you think he's bluffing?'
He meant me to think before I answered, and so I did that.
'You've found a motive, sir,' I said, looking straight ahead. 'If the synchrotron was out of action for
some design-fault reason, he could be tempted to make up something to clear his name. There is that.
But I don't see him doing it. I've seen him, I've listened to him. To my mind he's the kind of man who, if
there was anything about his equipment he did not know, he'd call someone else in even if it was the
nearest plumber. He'd only be interested in finding out. He'd think about his name afterwards. And then
there are the other facts that make his position unimpeachable and quite certain.'
'What facts?' the General said.