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

important to either of them.
That summer I saw a lot of Johnny. Things got on an interesting basis very quickly. It wasn't long
before he was giving me the kind of look that said, "I'd like to get involved-- but..." And there he'd stop.
Still, I figured that I was making more headway with him than I ever had with any of mother's previous
friends.
Finally, though, his "thus far and no farther" response grew irritating. Then challenging. Then...
I guess it was being around him constantly, knowing that he and mother were the way they were, that
made things turn out the way they did. In the process of trying to reel him in for closer inspection, I got
pulled in myself. Eventually I became quite shameless about it. I began trying to get him off to myself at
every opportunity.
We talked. But not about him. If he knew how he'd had his accident, and how he'd got here, he
apparently never told anybody. At least he would never tell me.
We talked about magnetrons.
Don't look so surprised.
Like yourself he was an expert on magnetrons. I think he knew even more than you about magnetrons.
And you thought you were the world's only expert, didn't you?
I pretended to listen to him, but I never understood more than the basic concepts-- namely, that
magnetrons were little entities sort of like electrons, sort of like gravitons, and sort of like I don't know
what. But at least I grasped the idea that a magnetronic field could warp the flow of time, and that if you
put an object in such a field, the results could be rather odd.
We talked a lot about magnetrons.
I planned our encounters hours, sometimes days, ahead. Quite early, I started borrowing mother's sun
briefs. Later, at times when he theoretically wasn't around, I sunbathed au naturel. With no visible
results except sunburn.
Toward the last I started sneaking out at night into the pines with my sleeping bag. I couldn't stand it,
knowing where he probably was.
Not that I gave up.
He was building a magnetronic generator. The first in the world. I'd been helping all one day to wire up
some of his equipment.
He had torn down the balcony railing and was building his machine out on the balcony, right over the
ravine. He could focus it, he said. I mean, there was a sort of "lens" effect in the magnetronic field, and he
was supposed to be able to focus this field.
The queer thing was, that when he finally got the lens aligned, the focus was out in thin air, just beyond
the edge of the balcony. Directly over the ravine. He didn't want anyone stumbling through the focus by
accident.
And through this lens you could hear sounds.
The ravine had been dry for months, ever since mother had diverted the rapids. But now, coming
through the lens, was this endless crash of water.
You could hear it all over the house.
The noise made me nervous. It seemed to subdue even them.
I didn't like that noise. I hauled my sleeping bag still further out into the pines. I could still hear it.
One night, a quarter of a mile from the house, I crawled out of my sleeping bag and started back
toward the house. I was going to wake him up and ask him to turn the thing off.
At least, that was my excuse for returning. And it was perfectly true that I couldn't sleep.
I had it all figured out. Just how quietly I'd open his door, just how I'd tiptoe over to his bed. How I'd
bend over him. How I'd put my hand on his chest and shake him, ever so gently.
Everything went as planned, up to a point.
There I was, leaning over his bed, peering through the dark at the blurry outlines of a prone figure.
I stretched out my hand.
It was not a male chest that I touched.