"Murray Leinster - A Logic Named Joe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

Sector 233, Zone 3, Home 1254, Radli.
The Thirty-Fourth Century, a.d.

My dear great-great-great-etc.-grandson Charles:
Your friend Hari Vans will discover this letter printed as a fiction story in an ancient, tattered book of
still more ancient fiction stories in the rare-books stacks of the University Library. He will be astonished
to see your name and still more astonished to read his own. He will be astounded to find your correct
address in a volume printed when neither you nor your address existed. So he will show this letter to you,
and in this way I can write you a very important message. The ordinary postal service could hardly be
expected to deliver a letter after fourteen centuries, and I feel I must tell you about urgent family matters.
I need to arrange, through you, to meet and woo (and of course to win, despite your unfilial
objections) your great-great-etc.-grandmother. When this letter is delivered, she will happen to be
engaged to you, so I do not really count on your co-operation. The most I expect is a frantic effort on
your part to prove that the whole business is pure lunacy. But that effort will be all I need, Charles, and I
think that for the family's sake you should make it. It really is a family matter. As nearly as I can compute
it on a basis of four generations to the century, you are my great-great-etc.-grandson some fifty-two
times removed. This relationship exists because of a somewhat unusual series of events, and you need to
know what to do to bring them about.
To make it clear . . . I imagine that in your day they still talk of time-travel as impossible because, so
the argument runs, if one went back in time a hundred years, landed on his grandfather, and happened to
kill him, he would make it impossible for himself to have been born. But of course if he wasn't born his
grandfather wouldn't be killed. So he would be born. So he would kill his grandfather. So he wouldn't be
born. Ad infinitum. I am sure you know this proof that time-travel is impossible.
However, I am your great-great-etc.-grandfather because of just the reverse of this classical
paradox. It happens that when you read this, you are about to discover me as a visitor come forward
from my time to yours. And in your time, with your extremely reluctant assistance, I shall woo and win
your current girl friend and bring her contentedly back to my century to become your
fifty-two-times-removed-grandmother.
I hardly expect you to approve the notion, Charles. You are inclined to be selfish. You will resist my
great-grandparental authority, not caring about the consequences to the family. But I think you will flub it.
After all, if you did manage to keep me from wooing and winning Ginny, you would not be born to stop
me. So I would woo and win her, in which case you would be born to stop me. If you did such a thing,
you would not be born. In short, I think I am going to marry Ginny. In fact, I already have, and now I
want to arrange for it.
Let me clarify the situation a little. In my senior year at Collins University, my physics professor was
Prof. Knut Hadley, Ph.D., M.A. etc., etc. He was a person with a sort of monorail mind, capable of
following an idea tenaciously over dizzy heights of improbability and through fastnesses of opposing facts.
In the previous semester he'd tracked an idea down. It was a dilly. As class-work, he had five of us
seniors help him put together an incredibly complicated electronic gadget that he said would provide
experimental proof of the verity of the Lorenz-Fitzgerald equation. His theory wasтАФ
No. I spare you that, Charles. Let's keep this simple. You just remember that if you manage to keep
me from winning Ginny you won't be born to keep me from winning Ginny, so I will win her and you will
be born to try and stop meтАФyou see? Just bear that in mind if you get confused. It may help.
In any case, Professor Hadley's apparatus took a splendid if incomprehensible form. We built it with
elaborate care. And some two weeks before graduation it was finished. Professor Hadley was jubilant.
Standing before us, he adjusted this and checked over that. He made sure of voltages and he measured
micro-ohms of resistance. And then he got ready to turn it on.
For obvious reasons, I am not going to give you any clues to how it was made. As it turned out, this
was the device by which I traveled to your century, and I wouldn't want you to make another and come
back to kill your fifty-two-times-removed-grandfather. You will want to, Charles, but it would be most