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

Venetian glass; from the eighteenth, a crucifix of carved rosewood; from the
nineteenth, when the palace had been the residence of an Austrian count and
his Italian mistress, a hand-illuminated copy of De Sade's La Nouvelle
Justine, very curiously bound in human skin.
They all vanished, naturally, within minutes or hours -- all but the
scent bottle. This gave Peter matter for reflection. There had been half a
dozen flickers of cloudiness in the sphere just futureward of the bottle; it
ought to have vanished, but it hadn't. But then, he had found it on the floor
near a wall with quite a large rat hole in it.
When objects disappeared unaccountably, he asked himself, was it
because they had rolled into rat holes, or because some time fisher had picked
them up when they were in a position to do so?
He did not make any attempt to explore the future. That afternoon he
telephoned his lawyers in Naples and gave them instructions for a new will.
His estate, including his half of the jointly owned Ischia property, was to go
to the Italian government on two conditions: (1) that Harold Castellare should
make a similar bequest of the remaining half of the property and (2) that the
Italian government should turn the palace into a national museum to house
Peter's collection, using the income from his estate for its administration
and for further acquisitions. His surviving relatives -- two cousins in
Scotland -- he cut off with a shilling each.
He did nothing more until after the document had been brought out to
him, signed and witnessed. Only then did he venture to look into his own
future.
Events were conserved, Harold had said -- meaning, Peter very well
understood, events of the present and future as well as of the past. But was
there only one pattern in which the future could be fixed? Could a result
exist before its cause had occurred?
The Castellare motto was Audentes fortuna juvat -- into which Peter, at
the age of fourteen, had interpolated the word "prudentesque": "Fortune favors
the bold -- and the prudent."
Tomorrow: no change; the room he was looking at was so exactly like
this one that the time sphere seemed to vanish. The next day: a cloudy blur.
And the next, and the next...
Opacity, straight through to what Peter judged, by the distance he had
moved the rheostat handle, to be ten years ahead. Then, suddenly, the room was
a long marble hall filled with display cases.
Peter smiled wryly. If you were Harold, obviously you could not look
ahead and see Peter working in your laboratory. And if you were Peter, equally
obviously, you could not look ahead and know whether the room you saw was an
improvement you yourself were going to make, or part of a museum established
after your death, eight or nine years from now, or ...
No. Eight years was little enough, but he could not even be sure of
that. It would, after all, be seven years before Harold could be declared
legally dead....
Peter turned the vernier knob slowly forward. A flicker, another, a
long series. Forward faster. Now the flickering melted into a grayness;
objects winked out of existence and were replaced by others in the showcases;
the marble darkened and lightened again, darkened and lightened, darkened and
remained dark. He was, Peter judged, looking at the hall as it would be some