"C M Kornbluth - Dominoes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

quarter of a million dollarsтАФa two-year forecast on the market was worth a billion! Four thousand to
one, he gloated; four thousand to one! Two hours to learn when the Great Bull Market of 1975 would
collapse and then back to his office armed with the information, ready to buy up to the very crest of the
boom and then get out at the peak, wealthy forever, forever beyond the reach of fortune, good or bad!



He stumped upstairs to Loring's loft in the West 70's.



Loring was badly overplaying the role of casual roughneck. Gangling, redheaded and unshaved, he
grinned at Born and said: "Watcha think of soy futures, W. J.? Hold or switch?"



W. J. Born began automatically: "If I knew I wouldn't тАФoh, don't be silly. Show me the confounded
thing."



Loring showed him. The whining generators were unchanged; the tall Van de Graaf accumulator still
looked like something out of a third-rate horror movie. The thirty square feet of haywired vacuum tubes
and resistances were still an incomprehensible tangle. But since his last visit a phone booth without a
phone had been added. A sheet-copper disk set into its ceiling was connected to the machinery by a
ponderous cable. Its floor was a slab of polished glass.



"That's it," Loring said. "I got it at a junkyard and fixed it up pretty. You want to watch a test on the
mice?"



"No," W.,J. Born said. "I want to try it myself. What do you think I've been paying you for?" He paused.
"Do you guarantee its safety?"



"Look, W. J.," Loring said, "I guarantee nothing. I think this will send you two years into the future. I
think if you're back in it at the end of two hours you'll snap



back to the present. I'll tell you this, though. If it does send you into the future, you had better be back in
it at the end of two hours. Otherwise you may snap back into the same space as a strolling pedestrian or
a moviBg_carтАФ and an H-bomb will be out of your league."