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

what she was doing in the evening, she was free. I was wrong about her and Strassen. They worked
together, but even before she had met him he had been happily married.
'Why don't you go away?' I asked her. 'It's hard to see how it could happen, the situation in the
wrecked laboratory, if you just went to live somewhere else, a hundred or a thousand miles away, and
never came near this place again. I don't think anyone would blame you. I don't see how they could. And
despite Galbraith, it might even be the most sensible thing, as a precaution, for all of us.'
We were walking along the path at that time towards the woods, and she glanced at me.
'Do you think I should do that? Do you want me to?'
'No,' I said. 'I'd like to say yes. My feelings tell me to say yes. But while you still have that tooth, I
think Galbraith's right. I don't see how you can get round that fact. I'm being selfish.'
She grinned at me coolly in inquiry, teasing me a little, wondering which way to take it.
It was true that one of the reasons Galbraith wanted to keep her there if we were to send a man was
that it would be safer for me. It was not easy to understand what was happening with the synchrotron,
and there were numbers of unknowns. No one knew exactly why, for example, the transfer was always
to the cave at what appeared to be about the same time. They had tried it often enough, and got the same
results, but with a new operator, who might unknowingly set up a slightly different field, no one knew
what would happen. But that was not what I had meant when I said it, and she guessed it.
'So you want me to stay in preference to going to live a thousand miles away?'
'A thousand miles is a long way to go visiting,' I said.
Her smile was still cool and challenging, almost a grin. 'And it might not be worth it, anyway,' she said.
'If I was the kind of girl who would want to cut up and run at the first sign of trouble instead of staying as
long as possible to see what I could do about it?'
I looked at the tops of the trees ahead, which were gilded in the evening light while the sun made long
slanting shadows below them.
'Is that what you feel about it?' I asked her. 'That you want to stay as long as possible and fight back
тАФ as long as you have that tooth?'
'It's a perfectly good tooth,' she said with some indignation. 'I never even had a toothache.' Then she
answered my question. She had that kind of mind. To her questions were neither all gallant nor rhetorical.
'I talked about it to Strassen too,' she said. 'I'm not in love with him, but I am influenced by him.'
'What did he say?'
'Can't you guess? He said either this thing is a prediction, or it isn't. If it is a genuine prediction, no
matter how, then it is absolute and final. We can't do anything about it, no matter how we try. But if it
isn't a prediction, if we admit that anything we can do can change it, then it simply isn't a genuine picture
of the future, and therefore there is nothing to worry about. Either way тАФ he found it hard to say this,
but he's a very honest man is Strassen тАФ it was no good my attempting to run away.'
I walked with her, feeling her companionship and wanting it, but at the same time thinking of
Strassen's reasoning.
'That's a very masculine way of thinking,' I said. 'That kind of hard "either, or" logic. It isn't the kind of
thing that would normally appeal to a woman.'
'People who don't believe in logic don't work with big and dangerous machines like a synchrotron,'
she said simply.
I got it then. It was the kind of revelation that comes sometimes in a lifetime. It isn't easy to explain. I
had been proud, I suppose, without knowing it, in my work at the rocket base. Staking our lives on logic
was our strength. We dealt with unimaginable forces. We faced heat, explosion, the vacuum and cold of
space. We guarded against all contingencies, and because we were as near perfect as it was humanly
possible to be, we got it right. We lived. Or if we failed, we died.
Now I realized that a girl in a laboratory could take as many risks, could calculate even more
insidious forces than those we dealt with more precisely, and in short had my own brand of courage with
far less show.
'All right,' I said. 'But in this case even if it were a prediction, I'm with the General. I think we can do