"Henry Kuttner - The Time Axis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

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THE TIME AXIS

Copyright, 1948, by Better Publications, Lie.

An Ace Book, by arrangement with The Estate of Henry Kuttner

All Rights Reserved

Cover by Alex Schomburg.

I

ENCOUNTER IN RIO

Printed in U.S.A.

THE whole thing never happened and I can prove itтАФnow. But Ira De Kalb made me wait a billion
years to write the story.

So we start with a paradox. But the strangest thing of all is that there are no real paradoxes
involved, not one. This is a record of logic. Not human logic, of course, not the logic of this
time or this space.

I don't know if men will ever journey again, as we journeyed, to that intersection of latitude and
longitude where a shell hangs foreverтАФforever and yet not forever, in space and out of spaceтАФon
the axis stretching through time from beginning to end.

From the dawn of the nebulae to the twilight of absolute entropy, when the framework of the cosmos
has broken

down into chaos, still that axis will stretch from dawn to dusk, from beginning to end. For as
this world spins on an axis through space, so the sphere of time spins on its own axis.

I never understood the ultimate answer. That was beyond me. It took the combined skills of three
great civilizations far apart in time to frame that godlike concept in which the tangible universe
itself was only a single factor.

And even then it was not enough. It took the Face of Ea тАФwhich I shall never be able to describe
fully.

I saw it, though. I saw it, luminous in the reddish dusk, speaking to me silently above the winds
that scour perpetually across the dead, empty lands of a day yet to come. I think it will stand
there forever in an empty land on a dead planet, watching the endless night draw slowly on through
days as long as years. The stars will stand and the Earth-nekropoh's will stand and the Face will
stand there forever. I was there. I saw it.

Was there? Will be? Maybe? I can't tell now. But of all stories in the world, this more than any
needs a pattern.