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

which he put it to the General. Yet Reckman saw his point. It was the thing he and I had been doubtful
about when the General had been talking of using the synchrotron as a kind of advance-warning air-raid
alert system, when we were arriving in the car. He came in quickly:
'You mean if the synchrotron were capable of showing us pictures of a catastrophe as a warning, and
we were capable of averting the catastrophe, then the synchrotron wouldn't be showing us pictures of a
catastrophe in the first place?'
'Exactly,' Strassen said with the chilly, daunting smile of the man of intellect confronted by the man of
action. 'I told you. The past causes the present. The present causes the future. That is the basic,
fundamental assumption of science. It is determinism maybe. But the only difficulty about prediction, as
any scientist will tell you, is just that we don't know enough. That's why we study. But that's what we
should do about this, and all we can do about this. Study it! See what we can learn from it! And with all
due respect, it's only a General who would think of taking short cuts!'
I watched General Bridger. I was alarmed. I knew that a General, by the time he had risen to the rank
and seniority of Bridger, must have some experience of dealing with civilians. But with top civilians and
the higher politicians, and then not without, as history showed, a considerable degree of friction. But for
him to be confronted by a civilian of Strassen's youth and lack of status, and to be taunted with an
assumption of intellectual superiority in just that way, might produce an explosion, I thought, at any
moment.
Bridger behaved well. At least he kept the remnants of his dignity. If he went red it was no more than
could be expected. 'Strassen,' he said, 'You're under orders! You aren't in charge here. Fortunately,
that's Galbraith. But if you were, you'd learn some elementary facts. You'd learn that when I say we send
a man, then we send a man!'
'I didn't say we wouldn't, did I?' Strassen said. 'So far as I remember the reason we came in here was
because you wanted me to show you how to do it in the first place.'
The event was smoothed over in that way and we went on to talk about whether I should be fitted
with a space-suit and oxygen cylinders and other equipment, and if so how we would fit them in the
sphere. But Reckman and I had a word about it when we found ourselves together as we came out.
'The young man had a point,' he said, looking at me curiously as we went towards the cars. 'Suppose
this is the future, this place you're going, and the General succeeds in altering it on the basis of your report
when you come back, just where exactly, and what should we call it, the place where you have been?'
'I know,' I said. 'I don't like it. If I go there, and then come back, and then we alter it, it won't only be
that the place and situation where I've been won't exist any more. We will have created events that will
imply that not only does it not exist but it never will exist and has never been. But the General's right, you
know. He's had more experience of human limitations, especially of knowledge, than Strassen. The only
thing to do is try it.'

CHAPTER FIVE
In what little time I had left to me before I went, I did my utmost to get to know Sara Francis.
I suppose it was natural I should feel for her. Everyone did. Hers was a situation no girl, no human
being, had ever met before. It was not merely that there was in existence a photograph of what purported
or appeared to be her skeleton after death. That was taken, so far as any of us could guess, at a period
of a hundred years on, and almost all of us then living would be skeletons by then. It was more the
particular circumstances of the photograph, the fact that it was the skeleton of Sara as a young woman,
and not Sara old, and all the surrounding detail, the disaster in the working laboratory of the synchrotron,
the wrecked control desk, and all the other evidences of some vast and near disaster in the place where
she went on working. It was true there was the singular item, the saving detail of the tooth, on which
Galbraith placed his confidence, insisting on its absolute validity, but it was an incredible situation to be
hanging over anyone, and I was surprised, even shocked and a little awed, that she bore up so well.
I went walking with her in the evening along the pathways the students had made that led along the
valley sides and into the woods. We had been busy all day with the preparations, but when I asked her