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

"There, you see?"
"What sort of devil's trick is that?"
"It goes back... Later you'll see. I had that thing out once before, and this happened. When the sphere became transparent again, the viol was where I had found it."
"And your explanation for this?"
Harold hesitated. "None. Until I can work out the appropriate mathematics -- "
"Which may take you some time. Meanwhile, in layman's language -- "
Harold's face creased with the effort and interest of translation. "Very roughly, then -- I should say it means that events are conserved. Two or three centuries ago -- "
"Three. Notice the sound holes."
"Three centuries ago, then, at this particular time of day, someone was in that room. If the viola were gone, he or she would have noticed the fact. That would constitute an alteration of events already fixed; therefore it doesn't happen. For the same reason, I conjecture, we can't see into the sphere, or -- " he probed at it with a fountain pen -- "I thought not -- or reach into it to touch anything; that would also constitute an alteration. And anything we put into the sphere while it is transparent comes out again when it becomes opaque. To put it very crudely, we cannot alter the past."
"But it seems to me that we did alter it, just now, when you took the viol out, even if no one of that time saw it happen."
"This," said Harold, "is the difficulty of using language as a means of exact communication. If you had not forgotten all your calculus ... However. It may be postulated (remembering of course that everything I say is a lie, because I say it in English) that an event which doesn't influence other events is not an event. In other words -- "
"That, since no one saw you take it, it doesn't matter whether you took it or not. A rather dangerous precept, Harold; you would have been burned at the stake for that at one time."
"Very likely. But it can be stated in another way or, indeed, in an infinity of ways which only seem to be different. If someone, let us say God, were to remove the moon as I am talking to you, using zero duration, and substitute an exact replica made of concrete and plaster of Paris, with the same mass, albedo and so on as the genuine moon, it would make no measurable difference in the universe as we perceive it -- and therefore we cannot certainly say that it hasn't happened. Nor, I may add, does it make any difference whether it has or not."
"'When there's no one about on the quad,'" said Peter.
"Yes. A basic and, as a natural consequence, a meaningless problem of philosophy. Except," he added, "in this one particular manifestation."
He stared at the cloudy sphere. "You'll excuse me, won't you, Peter? I've got to work on this."
"When will you publish, do you suppose?"
"Immediately. That's to say, in a week or two."
"Don't do it till you've talked it over with me, will you? I have a notion about it."
Harold looked at him sharply. "Commercial?"
"In a way."
"No," said Harold. "This is not the sort of thing one patents or keeps secret, Peter."
"Of course. I'll see you at dinner, I hope?"
"I think so. If I forget, knock on the door, will you?"
"Yes. Until then."
"Until then."

At dinner, Peter asked only two questions. "Have you found any possibility of changing the time your thing reaches -- from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, for example, or from Monday to Tuesday?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact. Amazing. It's lucky that I had a rheostat already in the circuit; I wouldn't dare turn the current off. Varying the amperage varies the time set. I've had it up to what I think was Wednesday of last week -- at any rate, my smock was lying over the workbench where I left it, I remember, Wednesday afternoon. I pulled it out. A curious sensation, Peter -- I was wearing the same smock at the time. And then the sphere went opaque and of course the smock vanished. That must have been myself, coming into the room."
"And the future?"
"Yes. Another funny thing, I've had it forward to various times in the near future, and the machine itself is still there, but nothing's been done to it -- none of the things I'm thinking I might do. That might be because of the conservation of events, again, but I rather think not. Still farther forward there are cloudy areas, blanks; I can't see anything that isn't in existence now, apparently, but here, in the next few days, there's nothing of that.
"It's as if I were going away. Where do you suppose I'm going?"

Harold's abrupt departure took place between midnight and morning. He packed his own grip, it would seem, left unattended, and was seen no more. It was extraordinary, of course, that he should have left at all, but the details were in no way odd. Harold had always detested what he called "the tyranny of the valet." He was, as everyone knew, a most independent man.
On the following day Peter made some trifling experiments with the time-sphere. From the sixteenth century he picked up a scent bottle of 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 five hundred years in the future. There was a thick film of dust on every exposed surface; rubbish and the carcass of some small animal had been swept carelessly into a corner.
The sphere clouded.
When it cleared, there was an intricate trail of footprints in the dust, and two of the showcases were empty.
The footprints were splayed, trifurcate, and thirty inches long.
After a moment's deliberation Peter walked around the workbench and leaned down to look through the sphere from the opposite direction. Framed in the nearest of the four tall windows was a scene of picture-postcard banality: the sun-silvered bay and the foreshortened arc of the city, with Vesuvio faintly fuming in the background. But there was something wrong about the colors, even grayed as they were by distance.