"H.H. Hollis - Sword Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hollis H. H)

on a wavy surface. This mouse cage is a cubed cage which
is partly displaced along the dimension of time. That's why
it appears formless and shifting. Here, feel it."
Sure enough, to the touch it was solid enough: a cube with
a cube on each face; but even when held in the hand and
sensed by touch, the object still appeared to be a rippling
cylinder and the mouse still appeared to be stock still.
"This mouse looks dead. Eccch!" she said.
Deftly the topologist withdrew the tiny sword, pried off the
top, and shook Mr. Mouse out in his hand, where the charm-
ing little fellow at once sat up on his haunches and waved his
forepaws, as if demanding cheese.
"How did you do .that?" cried the girl.
"Simple, really," replied the tinker. "The exterior flickers in
and ou~of this moment of time, because of the subtle twist I
imparted to the shape when I made it; but the inside is fixed
in time, because much of the internal mass is stretched all the
way around the very large but finite continuum of space and
time which is our universe. This little rascal's 'time' has
passed so slowly that the powerful regenerative and repair
processes of his body have worked as if instantaneously, and
the apparently mortal wound I dealt him was no more than
a pin prick. Do you think you could get into a large tesseract
like this one and let me run a rapier through you . . . knowing
it would do you no harm?"
She clapped her hands in pleasure. "Oh yes, lover! That'll
be so much more of a mind buster than some old wicker
basket that everybody knows I dodge the sword in."
So they hied themselves to a plastic supply house and
thence to a dog-and-pony show that was in the neighborhood,
and for a long time, everything went like a guided trip with
Tim Leary. Audiences were transfixed by the girl's beauty.
She was considerably cleaner under 'the difficult circumstances
of carnival trouping than she had been when soap and water
were conveniently to be had, and when the topologist drove
a sharpened fencing foil through her lovely body, clad as
lightly as local ordinance allowed, the crowds gasped. When
the box was rotated to show the point of the sword encarna-
dined, strong men fainted. Later they would press forward
and pay a dollar apiece to examine the tiny wound as it closed
up and disappeared, usually midway up her delightfully
articulated rib cage.
Trouping the carnival together was an idyll. Still, even if
forty years is not old, neither is it young; and the doctor of
mathematics at last realized that he was bored again. The
girl's vocabulary never enlarged itself appreciably, and the
snow cone remained her favorite confection. The difference
in their ages was sufficient for their basic sex attitudes to be
irreconcilable. For him, a certain overtone of the forbidden
gave carnal love its highest stimulation; but for her, sex was