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

type.
'The aim is to put a man in the place of those instruments,' Galbraith said.
In the semi-darkness of the projection room, visible only in the light reflected from the screen,
everyone was watching intently. The screen now showed us a general view of Sara adjusting her controls
and closing switches and of the laboratory clock at noon, and then once again it showed us the bell-jar in
the target area on the other side of the wall with the second camera and the instruments inside it.
At first nothing seemed to happen. Bell-jar and instruments looked lifeless as the power of the
synchrotron was directed on them. Then the hands of one of them came to life and began to move. It was
the clock.
Only a few seconds had passed, and yet the small clock among the instruments was registering three
minutes past the hour. The movement of the hands became visible after that. They moved round the clock
face with increasing speed. I looked at the other instruments. The radiation meter was up a bit, but not to
an extent to endanger human life.
'What is this?' Secretary Stephens said. 'Have you speeded up the film?'
The camera answered him. The screen's view of the laboratory tilted and swung and we saw Sara
again, watching her control desk carefully, and the wall clock behind her. The wall clock said two
minutes after twelve, but when the view returned to the target again, the clock among the instruments in
the bell-jar was reading one o'clock and the hands were speeding on.
Something else was happening too. It was as though a mist, a cloud, was forming in quite a large area
around the bell-jar. It made observation of the clock, the second camera, and the other instruments inside
the bell-jar difficult. The clock among the instruments could just be seen to be reading something to three
and then it was obscured by a darkening fog.
What we were seeing now was a misty sphere, perhaps five feet in diameter, that totally enclosed the
bell-jar. And the sphere darkened. It became opaque. Gradually it became wholly black, as though we
were seeing a hole in space.
Thinking of what Galbraith had said about putting a man in the place of those instruments, camera and
clock that had disappeared, I could not say I liked it. I did not see why they should do it, either.
'That is what happens,' said Galbraith. 'The instruments go. We keep the experiment in operation for
half an hour, and then release, and they come back. Now I propose to show you the same thing, and
further, as it is recorded on the second camera's film.'
He gave orders to the projectionist to stop the film he was showing, which was showing a static scene
in the laboratory, and transfer to the film that had been taken from the second camera on its return.
'You have a volunteer who will go and sit there, in the target area of your synchrotron, and let that
sphere form round him?' the Senator said. 'In what are you trying to involve the government? In licensed
suicide?'
'If the recording instruments say a man can survive, then he can survive,' the General said. 'Major
Judgen and his kind have been into all that in their experiments.'
It was dark and then fight and then dark again in the projection room as the operator switched spools
in his projector, and then we were watching film again.
This time it was the film taken by the camera inside the bell-jar.
It looked the same to begin with. There was Galbraith and Strassen, with Sara at the control desk,
and the clock above her head that said noon, all taken from the point of view I would have if I were
sitting out there in the 'hot' side of the laboratory and looking back at them through the mirrors above the
barrier wall.
But this camera did not shift around as the other had. We had to watch for ourselves. We could see
Sara making the final movements on her board in response to a word from Galbraith, and then it was the
laboratory wall-clock above her that speeded up.
I looked at it and looked again. Its hands too were going round the dial with increasing speed. And
then I saw something odd in Strassen's movements as he appeared on the screen. He was adjusting the
dome of the robot-handling machinery which they kept in position around the target area, and he had to