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

life. I could all but feel it move.

I touched it.

I wish I hadn't. But I was thinking of my money. My hand closed on the thingтАФon a part of itтАФno
one will ever know on just what. I Van only tell you it was smooth with a smoothness that burned
my hand. Friction burned it, I think now. The sheer velocity of the thing, though it was not then
moving perceptibly, took a neat thin layer of cuticle off my palm wherever it touched. I think it
slid out of my grip on a thin lubrication of my own skin.

You know how it is when you touch something white-hot? For an instant it may feel cold. I didn't
know I was burned. I closed my hand hard on theтАФon whatever it was I had hold of. And the very
pressure of the grip seemed to push it away, out of my hand, very smooth and fast. All I know is
that a moment later I stood there, shaking my band because it stung and watching something dark in
the moonlight vanish down the street with a motion that frightened me.

I was too dazed to shout. By the time my wits came back it had disappeared and the feeling of
unreality it left behind made me doubt whether I had ever seen or felt it at all.

About ten minutes later I found my money was gone. So it wasn't a turning point in my life, after
all. If things had worked out any differently I never would have met Ira De Kalb. I never would
have got myself mixed up in that series of deaths which so far as I was concerned were only
signposts pointing the way to De Kalb. Maybe it was a turning point, at that.

The mind as well as the senses can be awfully slow sometimes. The hand doesn't know it has been
burned, the mind can't recognize the impossible when it confronts it. There are many little
refuges for a mind that must not admit to itself the impossible has happened.

I went back to my hotel that night and got into bed. I had met a thief, I told myself drowsily, as
I'd deserved-walking a city street that late at night, loaded down with cash. I had it coming.
He'd got my money and that was that. (HeтАФitтАФhadn't touched the money, or me, except in that one
brief unbalanced instant. The thing was impossible.

But since it had happened, then it was possible and the mind could dismiss it.) I went to sleep.

And woke at dawn to the most extraordinary experience I'd ever had in my life, up to then. Even
that encounter on the Rua d'Ouvidor hadn't been like this.

The experience was pure sensation. And the sensation was somewhere inside me, vaguely in the solar
plexus regionтАФa soundless explosion of pure energy like a dazzling sun coming into sudden, radiant
being. There aren't any accurate words to tell about it.

But I was aware of ring after ring of glowing vitality bursting outward from that nova in the
deepest nerve-center of my body. For a timeless instant I lay there, bathed in it, feeling it pour
like a new kind of blood through my veins. In that instant I knew what it was.

Then somebody turned off the power at its source.

I sat up abruptly, empty of the radiance, empty as if it had never happened, but filled terribly
with the knowledge of what had caused it.