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

go from one part of the laboratory to another. He moved jerkily and with increasing, and then with
fantastic speed.
Secretary Stephens said: 'Wait! There's something wrong! If it were true that time in that fishbowl
from which this film was taken was speeded up, then this clock should be shown going slower, not
faster!'
'You see why I wanted you to see for yourself,' said Galbraith.
'He's right!' said the Senator. 'Here you've got two clocks speeding up, each when seen from the
other's viewpoint. It casts doubt on your whole experiment!'
'I'd agree if we knew anything about time,' Galbraith said. 'It seems we don't.'
'Before this, no one's succeeded in affecting it in any way,' said Bridger.
Even Reckman spoke up diffidently. 'We had our experts puzzle about this,' he said. 'They talked of
different and divergent time-tracks.'
Galbraith made no comment. I thought perhaps he did not want to get into an argument with the
Intelligence experts. He had been simpler. He had just said he did not know the answer.
But arguments and questions were stopped by what was happening on the screen. In the other film
we had seen a dark opaque sphere form around the camera out of which we were now looking. But the
camera in the target did not record it that way. What was obscuring the view of the laboratory and of the
clock, which said twenty to three by then, and of the view of the blurred, uncertain darting shapes of
Sara, Galbraith and Strassen (we were getting pictures of them even after the experiment was over,
Strassen told me later), was a luminous, pearly mist.
The screen suddenly showed us pictures of nothing but a wavering light, and then a total darkness.
'Over-exposed and then under-exposed,' Galbraith said.
 The screen had become light again.
'This is where the inexplicable part begins,' said Galbraith.
The screen was showing us alternate light and darkness in a rapid succession that was slowing down
like a television picture warming. And there was something in those pictures if only, straining our eyes in
the projection room, we could see them.
Then the picture steadied. The alterations of light and dark became slower until, with a last heave, the
picture held.
I heard an audible gasp in the projection room. It was only as I heard it that I realized I had joined in
it.
The picture, at first sight, was not the same scene at all, of the laboratory, that we had seen at the
beginning of the experiment. And then, on second sight, it was too much the same, but in a most fantastic
fashion.
We seemed to be looking outwards from the interior darkness of a cave.
I can only describe the scene in detail. It was the crucial piece of evidence and the subject, I suddenly
realized, of what everything else, my own presence there, and that of General Bridger, and Reckman,
and the Secretary and the Senator, was all about.
The picture, that could only have been actually taken by the camera, was a view outwards over
tumbled rocks and debris. The outer wall of the laboratory, if it was the laboratory, was gone. The
rock-face was open. And outside, beyond the wreckage, was a glimpse not of the hills around Lake
Valley, but of ice-peaks, high and far away, and jagged mountains.
That was what the first glance showed. The second showed that there was something all too familiar
about the cave. The rocks and debris in the foreground, though they were dark in the camera picture,
had very much the look of the barrier wall. Jagged scraps glinted among them that could have been
remaining fragments of the mirrors. There were items visible here and there in the cave that were certainly
not rocks and certainly not natural. They had very much the look of being broken electrical equipment.
But the most important thing was shown almost clearly in the half-light from the entrance. It was the
wrecked control desk, tilted and turned over, damaged as though something heavy had fallen on it from
above, but none the less there.