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

I felt sorry for him. Also, some of the schoolteachers were hanging around where I soda-jerked and
happened to be walking my way when I quit.
I remembered the physics lab as a quiet place where one might peacefully drink a bottle of beer in
the evenings. Or the mornings, for that matter. I agreed to help Joe. We began. And that is how
fifty-two-times-removed-great-grandsons are born.
You are a result of all this, Charles.
Understand this, Charles, I have to tell my story as fiction in order to get it into print so Hari Vans will
show it to you so you will yank on a piece of sash cord. . . . There is a paradox involved, CharlesтАФif
you haven't noticed. In my century and in my life, these things happened in June and July of a year ago.
It's just about twenty-two months since Joe and I got Professor Hadley's gadget rebuilt and moved a safe
distance away from it before we turned it on. But that device carried me into the thirty-fourth century,
where Ginny was waiting interestedly to meet me because she'd read this letter. But twenty-two months
ago I had not written it. Yet if you're to act in your typically impulsive wayтАФand if Ginny is to regard me
with the bright and fascinated eyes of a girl looking at the man she knows she's going to marryтАФI have to
write it some time, don't I? So the things that have happened will take place?
Now let's talk about Professor Hadley's time-transporter instead. Shall we?
It was remarkably complicated to look at. There were coils and electron tubes. There were
inductances, grid leaks and transistors, with dials, rheostats, feedbacks and assorted hardware. I didn't
understand it, and even Joe grew more and more pained as we replaced one after another of the
burned-out wires and condensers and whatnots, and it made progressively less sense to him. He knew
his books, did Joe, but this was something else. Still, we got it rebuilt, and I could swear that it was
exactly the way Professor Hadley'd had it put together, except with heavier wiring.
The Professor must have been pretty bright. He'd been absolutely sure the thing would demonstrate
the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction, but it was much more remarkable than that. It was a time-transporter,
moving objects from one temporal frame of reference to another.
Every scientist in history has said that can't be done. I hope the Professor, wherever he isтАФin the
Upper Devonian or Jurassic or even the Lower Cretacious periodтАФknows of his accidental triumph.
 But Joe and I just sat and looked at it when it was done, Charles. We didn't know the next step to
take. We had no idea what it would do, and neither of us was especially anxious to glow a luminous puce
color and, however happily smiling, fade away into nothingness. We put a long extension-cord on the
switch. From some distance away we turned the thing on. Nothing happened. We turned it off. I put an
empty beer-bottle where Professor Hadley had stood and we turned the thing on. The beer-bottle
glowed a pale pink and faded away. We turned the thing off. Nothing happened. The beer-bottle stayed
gone.
We looked at each other. Joe looked very pained indeed. But then he muttered something about
discovering the physical nature of the barrier. He tied a string to a beer-bottle. We vanished it. When we
turned the gadget off it looked like the string was cut in half. But when Joe picked it up to look at the cut
end, the beer-bottle came out of nowhere, still tied fast.
About that time I began to dither, Charles. I will be frank about it. There is much that I do not
understand about Professor Hadley's time-transporter. It was the first one ever made, and I am quite
sure there will never be another. If there is, it will be over my dead body. Right then, I opened a bottle of
beer.
And Norton, the laboratory cat, came gloomily into the room. He was gaunt and seedy and with his
usual hangover. I regret to tell you, Charles, that in my day some of the lower animals sank to
near-human depths. Norton was notorious at Collins University for his intemperate habits. Believe it or
not, he would pass up a sardine for a cocktail any day, and on the morning after a wet night he was
frequently to be seen prowling about empty beer-cans trying to get a hair of the dog that bit him. Not that
any dog would dare bite Norton, no! Norton was a mighty warrior, in his cups. One Christmas he got
tanked up on egg-nog.
But that has nothing to do with you, Charles. This morning Norton came loping over to me with an