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

suggest. When he had done all these things, the next ten years were as blank
as before.
Peter had more than half expected it. He checked through his list of
safeguards once more, found it good, and thereafter let the matter rest. He
had done all he could; either he would survive the crisis or he would not. In
either case, events were conserved; the time-sphere could give him no
forewarning.
Another man might have found his pleasure blunted by guilt and fear;
Peter's was whetted to a keener edge. If he had been a recluse before, now he
was an eremite; he grudged every hour that was not given to his work. Mornings
he spent in the vault, unpacking his acquisitions; afternoons and evenings,
sorting, cataloguing, examining and -- the word is not too strong -- gloating.
When three weeks bad passed in this way, the shelves were bare as far as the
power cable would allow him to reach in every direction, except for crates
whose contents were undoubtedly too large to pass through the sphere. These,
with heroic self-control, Peter had left untouched.
And still he had looted only a hundredth part of that incredible
treasure house. With grappling hooks he could have extended his reach by
perhaps three or four yards, but at the risk of damaging his prizes; and in
any case this would have been no solution but only a postponement of the
problem. There was nothing for it but to go through the sphere himself and
unpack the crates while on the other "side" of it.

Peter thought about it in a fury of concentration for the rest of the
day. So far as he was concerned, there was no question that the gain would be
worth any calculated risk; the problem was how to measure the risk and if
possible reduce it.
Item: He felt a definite uneasiness at the thought of venturing through
that insubstantial bubble. Intuition was supported, if not by logic, at least
by a sense of the dramatically appropriate. Now, if ever, would be the time
for his crisis.
Item: Common sense did not concur. The uneasiness had two symbols. One
was the white face of his brother Harold just before the water closed over it;
the other was a phantasm born of those gigantic, splayed footprints in the
dust of the gallery. In spite of himself, Peter had often found himself trying
to imagine what the creatures that made them must look like, until his
visualization was so clear that he could almost swear he had seen them.
Towering monsters they were, with crested ophidian heads and great
unwinking eyes; and they moved in a strutting glide, nodding their heads, like
fantastic barnyard fowl.
But, taking these premonitory images in turn: first, it was impossible
that he should ever be seriously inconvenienced by Harold's death. There were
no witnesses, he was sure; he had struck the blow with a stone, stones also
were the weights that had dragged the body down, and the rope was an odd
length Peter had picked up on the shore. Second, the three-toed Somethings
might be as fearful as all the world's bogies put together; it made no
difference, he could never meet them.
Nevertheless, the uneasiness persisted. Peter was not satisfied; he
wanted a lifeline. When he found it, he wondered that he had not thought of it
before.