"James E. Gunn - Crisis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

Prelude
Man in the Cage
He never knew whether he was troubled by memory or nightmare.

Every few days he dreamed about a pendulum. It swung back and forth like the regulator of a clock. He
sensed the movement and he heard a sound not a tick but a swoosh, as if something were moving rapidly
through the air. At first he had only a vague impression of things, but gradually details came into focus.
The pendulum arm, for instance, was more like a silvery chain with wires running through it down to the
weight at the end.

Then scale became apparent. The entire apparatus was big. It swung in a cavern whose sides were so
distant they could not be seen, and the wires were thick, like bus bars. The weight was a kind of cage,
and it was large enough to hold a person standing upright. Somewhere, far beyond the cavern,
unpleasantness waited. Here, there was only hushed expectancy.

In his dream he could see only the glittering chain and the cage; it swung back and forth, and at the end of
each swing, where the pendulum should have slowed before it started its return, the cage blurred as if it
were swinging too fast to be seen.

At this point he always realized that the cage was occupied. He was in the cage. And he understood that
the pendulum marked not the passage of time but a passage through time.

The dream always ended the same way: the cage arrived with a barely perceptible jar, with a cessation of
motion, and he woke up. Even awake he had the sense that somewhere the pendulum still was swinging,
he still was in the cage, and eyes were watching himтАФor perhaps a single eye, like a camera, that
revealed to him a scene of what might be.тАж

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Episode One
End of the World
He was lying on his right side, his right leg drawn up, his right arm stretched out, his left arm lying along
his side and hip. Another wide bed was beside him, its slick, dark-green spread unwrinkled, its
pillow-bulges intact against the dark wood of the headboard. Beyond the bed was a small desk with a
straight chair in front of it. To its left was a six-sided pedestal table made of dark wood; armchairs on
wheels and covered with green plastic stood on either side. Beyond that was a window sealed from the
outer light or dark by heavy drapes and curtains, but a line like bright silver ascended vertically where
they failed to meet.

The man rose to a sitting position, his knees drawn up. A television set stood in the corner, its large blank
eye challenging him to fill it with pictures and meaning. A dresser with two sets of three drawers was
against the wall at the foot of the beds, above it a wide mirror. The room was hotel standard. Farther to
the left would be a bathroom with a tub that could be turned into a shower by closing a curtain or plastic
doors, a stool, and a broad, imitation-marble lavatory with a mirror above. If this were a
better-than-average hotel, the bathroom would have an anteroom with an open closet facing a wet bar;
on the bar would be a plastic tub, which could be filled with ice from a machine down the hall, and four
plastic glasses sealed into polyethylene bags.

All of this the man should have known but didn't. Instead he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and