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

been around at the time. Since then 85 and 87 have decayed into other elements. But Sea-borg and
Ghiorso at UC made them synthetically, with the big cyclotron and atomic oven transmutation, and
the column on one side of that trivial item said SECOND BURN-DEATH VICTIM FOUND, and on the other
there was a crossword puzzle.

I didn't care, either.

Those deaths, by an indefinable sort of burning, were just starting to confound the United States
authorities at the time. They hadn't yet spread to South America.

There was another item in that same ParAr that concerned me though I didn't know it at the time
seemed that Ira De Kalb was working with Military Intelligence on some sort of highly secret
projectтАФso secret you could read all about it as far south as Rio if you had the price of the
paper.

I had my own current problem. And it was a very odd one.

The thing started six weeks before it began. You'll have to get used to paradoxтАФwhich isn't
paradox once you grasp the idea.

It started in an alley in Rio, a little cobbled tunnel opening off the Rua d'Ouvidor, and what I
was doing there at three o'clock of a summer morning in January I'll never be able to tell you.
I'd been drinking. Also I'd been playing chemin de fer and there was a thick pad of banknotes in
the inside pocket of my white jacket, another stuffed into the dark wine-colored cummerbund I was
wearing.

Looking down, I could see the toes of my shoes twinkling in the moonlight as I walked. The sky
twinkled too, and the lights up in the hills and out on the bay. The world was a shiny place,
revolving gently around me.

I was rich. But this time it was going to last. This time I'd cut out the binges and take a little
house up in Petropolis, where it's cool, and I'd really get down to work on the analysis of news-
coverage I'd been planning for so long. I'd made up my mind. I was drunk but I'd be sober again
and the resolution would stay behind when the liquor died.


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I don't often get these fits of decision but when they come they're valid enough and I knew this
one was serious. That was a turning point in the career of Jerry Cortland, there in the moonlight
on the checkered pavement.

What happened at the mouth of that alley I'll never really know. Fortunately for me I couldn't see
or realize it clearly, being drunk.

It sprang from the deep shadow and put out two arms at me. That much I'm sure of. Two arms that
never touched me. They never meant to. They shot past my ears, and I heard a thin hissing noise
and something seemed to turn over in my mind, leisurely, like a deep-buried thought stirring to