"Charles L. Harness-Child by Chronos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

 After that night I was able to figure out all by myself that mother's business firm, Tomorrow, Inc., was
based on something more than knowledge of up-to-the-minute trends in economics, science, and politics.
But what?
I never asked her. I didn't think she would tell me, and I didn't want to give her the satisfaction of
refusing an explanation. But perhaps that wasn't the only reason I didn't ask. I was also afraid to ask.
Toward the end it was almost as though we had arrived as a tacit understanding that I was not to ask,
because in good time I was going to find out without asking.
Tomorrow, Inc., made a great deal of money. Mother's success in predicting crucial public
developments was uncanny. And she never guessed wrong. Naturally, her clients made even more
money than she did, because they had more to invest initially. On her advice they plunged in the deeply
depressed market two weeks before the Hague Conference arrived at the historic Concord of 1970.
And it was mother who predicted the success of Bartell's neutronic-cerium experiments, in time for
Cameron Associates to corner the world supply of monazite sand. And she was equally good at
predicting Derby winners, Supreme Court decisions, elections, and that the fourth rocket to the moon
would be the first successful one.
She was intelligent, but hardly in the genius class. Her knowledge of the business world was
surprisingly limited. She never studied economics or extrapolated stock market curves. Tomorrow, Inc.,
didn't even have a news ticker in its swank New York office. And she was the highest paid woman in the
United States in 1975.
In 1976, during the Christmas holidays, which I was spending with mother at Skyridge during my
junior year at college, mother turned down a three-year contract with Lloyd's of London. I know this
because I dug the papers out of the wastebasket after she tore them up. There were eight digits in the
proposed annual salary. I knew she was making money, but not that kind. I called her to task.
"I can't take a three-year contract," she explained. "I can't even take a year's contract. Because I'm
going to retire next month." She was looking away from me, out over the lodge balcony, into the wood.
She couldn't see my expression. She murmured, "Did you know your mouth was open rather wide?"
"But you can't retire!" I clipped. And then I could have bitten my tongue off. My protest was an
admission that I envied her and that I shone in her reflected fame. Well, she had probably known it
anyhow. "All right," I continued sullenly. "You're going to retire. Where'll you go? What'll you do?"
"Why, I think I'll stay right here at Skyridge," she said blithely. "Just fixing up the place will keep me
busy for a good many months. Take those rapids under the balcony, for instance. I think I'll just do away
with them. Divert the stream, perhaps. I've grown a little tired of the sound of running water. And then
there's all that dogwood out front. I've been considering cutting them all down and maybe putting in a
landing field. You never know when a copter might come in handy. And then there's the matter of
haystacks. I think we ought to have at least one somewhere on the place. Hay has such a nice smell, and
they say it's so stimulating."
"Mother!"
Her brow knitted. "But where could I put a haystack?"
Just why she was using such a puerile method of baiting me I couldn't understand. "Why not in the
ravine?" I said acidly. "It'll be dry after you divert the rapids. You'd be famous as the owner of the only
ground-level haystack in New England."
She brightened immediately. "That's it! What a clever girl."
"And what happens after you get him in the haystack?"
"Why I guess I'll just keep him in there."
"You guess!" I cried. (I'd finally trapped her!) "Don't you know?"
"I know only the things that are going to happen during the next six months-- up until the stroke of
midnight, June 3, 1977. As to what happens after that, I can't make any predictions."
"You mean you won't."
"Can't. My retirement is not arbitrary."
I looked at her incredulously. "I don't understand. You mean-- this ability-- it's going to leave you--