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

in the act? I just don't seem to be putting that foil home
right."
She was so pleased to have him pleasant again that she
scampered into the spare tesseract they had in the quarters,
a few drops from the bath still glistening on one flank. She
turned her face up to him with a grin that almost made him
reconsider the irreversible act he had planned. Then he
remembered the months of boredom and hardened his heart.
Decisively, he tapped the top home. Without a tremor, he
put the Roman short sword as nearly into her heart as he
could judge its location through the subtle time shifting in
the plastic. With that, he snapped off the blade, so that the
sword also was within the spread, slowed effect of the moving
time field, and gave the construction a knowledgeable kick
or two which caused it to collapse into itself. Instead of a
knobby cylinder, as it had appeared when it was an expanded
cube blurred by time, it now appeared to be a single cube
about six inches on a side, with an abstract pattern in each
face.
The collapsed cube was much heavier than it looked, but
not nearly as heavy as the girl, for a substantial part of her
mass was distributed along the whole of the cylindrico-
spherical space-time continuum. As he gazed at the mirror-
like surface of one square face, an eye and eyebrow slowly
spread flatly across the plane; but there was neither panic nor
recognition as he stared into it. He realized that to the occu-
pant of this peculiar box, his movements were so fast in
appearance as to be a mere blur. Whistling, the professor
packed the weighty cube into his bag and strolled off the lot,
casually remarking to his old Hindu neighbor, "So long, we're
jumping this flea circus." By changing into one of his
wrinkled natural shoulder suits at the bus station, he simply
disappeared as Grax, the Swordsman of Time (his carnival
billing), and reincarnated himself as a topologist of con-
siderable talent who had been vaguely on sabbatical for
a while.
The frustrations that had so nearly consumed him before
his adventure seemed to have been burned and purged away.
He settled with pleasure into a new academic routine and
became expert in its execution. Once in five years, perhaps,
he had a really promising student; but the scarcity no longer
bothered him. As he advanced up the ladder of academic
tenure and preferment, he was able to place a few brilliant
people about himself, and life was as good, he now knew, as
it was ever going to be.
The heavy cube was a paperweight on the desk in his
apartment. No one else ever recognized the shifting abstract
patterns in its silvery sides as the topologized contours of a
dead human being. At great intervals, 'there would drift across
one face or another of the prism some recognizable anatomi-