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

cal feature with which the professor was intimately ac-
quainted, and he would feel a vague regret for his act and a
light stirring, as of the ashes in a cold grate, of his appetite
for the one adventure of his life. He would stuff his pipe, turn
the pages of the Journal of Topology, and immerse himself
once more in the calm, sweet life of the university.
When he was sixty years old and almost bald, there ap-
peared in his classes the student of his dreams, who under-
stood everything he said in his arcane specialty, and replied
with fresh and elegant insights into the intuitive- sort of math
in which they both delighted. Objectively, he knew the boy
was neat and trim rather than handsome, yet subjectively
(and privately, of course: he was very proper now), he
always felt the boy was "good-looking." This feeling puzzled
him until one day he had to move a stack of old college
annuals, and browsing as one will, he suddenly came upon
his own senior picture. His best student was enough like his
youthful self to be a double, or at least a younger brother.
Shortly after that, the professor confided the story of his
escapade to the boy. He could not have said why he did so,
and it certainly was not wise; but the student was beginning
to betray the same weird talent the professor had for trans-
lating topological abstractions into hardware that did peculiar
things; and somehow the tale just told itself. He had become
very fond indeed of his disciple. The boy, who affected the
total amorality which was the fashion of his generation, was
nevertheless shocked; but he was also intrigued. He picked
up the box and shook it. "Maybe she's alive," he said. "After
all, inside it's only been an instant. Let's unlock it."
"Don't be ridiculous," the professor said, taking the cube
back and setting it on his desk in a definite manner. "In the
first place, she's not alive. While she's in the construction,
there's no evidence of the crime. Second, if she were alive,
she might go to the police; or worse yet, she might expect me
to take up that dreadful, boring liaison with her again. And
in the third place, we can't unlock it. That was the whole
point of breaking the sword. The cube's a closed system now,
and no part of the interior is available to this aspect of time
and space. Eventually she'll be equally distributed through
the entire universe. Absolutely not! I forbid you to think
about it. When are you going to give me that paper on
topological re-intervertebrates?"
Conversation languished, and the student shortly took his
leave. A day or two later, the professor found the boy
fiddling the edges of the cube with a device made of mirrors,
and they had a genuine quarrel; but gradually they fell back
almost into their former sympathetic teacher-student relation.
One day the student appeared in the professor's apartment
with a tiny glittering piece of metal in his hand, the shape of
which was extraordinarily hard to see. The whole thing