"Charles L. Harness-Stalemate in Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

of peace."
Again outside the ship, he spun the space lock that sealed her in. The ship's walls were now growing
opaque and he could no longer see inside.
His communications box was jangling furiously in a dozen different keys, and anxious, querulous voices
were pouring through it into the room. He snapped it off, loosened his collar, filled his glass to
overflowing with the last of the terif, and cut off the table luminar. His stereop projector next had his
attention.
He lay on his couch in the darkness of his death cell, studying with the keenest satisfaction his wife,
son, and father, while they waved at him happily from the radiant stereop sphere.
Those Terran mentors had planned well. The escape ship would not be affected by the nearing
cataclysm, because it was really in a different time plane-- at least five years in the past. The catastrophe
would simply release it to its original continuum, whence it would proceed with its precious cargo to the
Tharn suns.
 Odd effect, that time shift. He wished now he'd read more of the theories of that ancient Terran,
Einstein, who claimed that simultaneity was an illusion-- that "now" here could be altogether different from
"now" in other steric areas. His son, unborn as yet "here," was more than four years old "there"-- on the
planet Tharn-R-VII, where the lad played in his grandfather's gardens.
And then there was the mystery of the rings. The old count had not had another ring made, of course.
The ring the count had sent with the stereop coils must have been the same one that Perat had just placed
on the finger of his bride. The ring sent with the stereops was merely his original ring brought back in the
relooping of a time-line. In his "now" there was only one ring-- the one he was wearing. In Evelyn's "now"
there was the same ring, but that was logical, because her "now" would soon be five years earlier than
his. Owing to this five-year relooping of time, it had been possible for the ring to exist in duplicate for six
weeks. But very soon, in his "now," it would be destroyed for good.
He pressed the repeat button on the stereop and started the coil again. The boy had an engaging grin,
rather like his own (he would indulge a final vanity), but without the scar. He hoped there would never be
another war to disfigure or kill his son. It was up to the next generation.
As he swirled his terif, he smiled and thought of the note he had left on the pilot's pad: Name him
after your father-- Gordon.
***


"...failed to find any survivors, or for that matter, any trace whatever of either globe, if one
excepts the supernova that appeared for a quarter metron some thirty yeas ago at the far margin
of the proton storm. We of the Armistice Commission therefore unanimously urge that further
hostilities by either side would necessarily be indecisive..."
-- Scythe-Terran Armistice, History and Tentative Provisions (excerpts):
Gordon of Tharn, Editor-in-Chief and Primary Scythian Delegate.