"Damon Knight - Anachron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

Franklin's. He had done respectable work in physics and electronics, and had
even, at his lawyer's insistence, taken out a few patents. The income from
these, when his own purchases of instruments and equipment did not consume it,
he gave to his brother, who accepted it without gratitude or rancor.
Harold, at fifty-three, was spare and shrunken, sallow and spotted,
with a bloodless, melancholy countenance; on his upper lip grew a neat hedge
of pink-and-salt mustache, the companion piece and antithesis of his brother's
goatee.
On a certain May morning, Harold had an accident.
Goodyear dropped rubber on a hot stove; Archimedes took a bath;
Becquerel left a piece of uranium ore in a drawer with a photographic plate.
Harold Castallare, working patiently with an apparatus which had so far
consumed a great deal of current without producing anything more spectacular
than some rather unusual corona effects, sneezed convulsively and dropped an
ordinary bar magnet across two charged terminals.
Above the apparatus a huge, cloudy bubble sprang into being.
Harold, getting up from his instinctive crouch, blinked at it in
profound astonishment. As he watched, the cloudiness abruptly disappeared and
he was looking through the bubble at a section of tesselated flooring that
seemed to be about three feet above the real floor. He could also see the
corner of a carved wooden bench, and on the bench a small, oddly shaped
stringed instrument.
Harold swore fervently to himself, made agitated notes, and then began
to experiment. He tested the sphere cautiously with an electroscope, with a
magnet, with a Geiger counter. Negative. He tore a tiny bit of paper from his
notepad and dropped it toward the sphere. The paper disappeared; he couldn't
see where it went.
Speechless, Harold picked up a meter stick and thrust it delicately
forward. There was no feeling of contact; the rule went into and through the
bubble as if the latter did not exist. Then it touched the stringed
instrument, with a solid click. Harold pushed. The instrument slid over the
edge of the bench and struck the floor with a hollow thump and jangle.
Staring at it, Harold suddenly recognized its tantalizingly familiar
shape.
Recklessly he let go the meter stick, reached in and picked the fragile
thing out of the bubble. It was solid and cool in his fingers. The varnish was
clear, the color of the wood glowing through it. It looked as if it might have
been made yesterday.
Peter owned one almost exactly like it, except for preservation -- a
viola d'amore of the seventeenth century.
Harold stooped to look through the bubble horizontally. Gold and rust
tapestries hid the wall, fifty feet away, except for an ornate door in the
center. The door began to open; Harold saw a flicker of umber.
Then the sphere went cloudy again. His hands were empty; the viola
d'amore was gone. And the meter stick, which he had dropped inside the sphere,
lay on the floor at his feet.

"Look at that," said Harold simply.
Peter's eyebrows went up slightly. "What is it, a new kind of
television?"