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

imploring air, as one who would say feverishly: "Fella, give me one drink to straighten me out, and so help
me I'm gonna join AA!" I gave him the drink. He lapped it up, broodingly. Then he burped, rolled over
and went to sleep.
The same idea struck Joe and myself simultaneously.
You've guessed it. We waked Norton and tied a string to his collar, put him in the place from which
the beer-bottle had gone into the wild blue yonder, and threw on the time-transporter switch. Norton
was in the act of yawning as the current went on. His yawn continued undisturbed. He glowed, to be
sure. Brilliantly. But he faded to invisibility in a sort of brownish-purple mist. The last we saw of him was
his teeth just beginning to close in the insouciant manner so typical of him.
We turned off the time-transporter. Norton stayed gone. We discussed the matter at length. I went
and pulled on the string. And Norton, tied to it, yielded to my tugging. He came protestingly out of
nowhere, blinking reproachfully. He had every appearance of having been interrupted in a nap. He was
unharmed and undisturbed save by our waking him. We put him down, and he curled up and went back
to sleep.
Perhaps we were not conservative, Charles. After only one experiment with an animal, we probably
should not have gone on immediately to a human subject. But we were enthusiastic. That is, I was
enthusiastic, and Joe was pallidly grim. We solemnly matched to see who would fade out. I lost.
Therefore I met your great-great-etc.-grandmother, through the help you are going to give me.
I rather like your numerously-great-grandmother, Charles. She's quite nice to have around. She's
cuddly. We've been married for practically two years and I still approve of her. But of course in your
time we haven't yet met. I know, though, that you will not fail me, my dear
great-great-great-and-so-on-grandson!
As I understand the matter, Charles, your friend Harl will show you this letter in the book in which it
is reprinted. You will read it and be enraged. You will profanely declare it nonsense. Harl will thereupon
show it to your friends Stan and LakiтАФand of course to Ginny. And they will gang up on you. They will
demand clamorously that you see if it is true. Ginny, in particular, will coax youтАФstamping her foot from
time to timeтАФand no descendant of mineтАФor of hers, if you can possibly grasp the ideaтАФcould possibly
refuse Ginny anything.
Anyhow, on the morning after somebody named Dorlig wins the Lunar ground-to-ground race (your
great-etc.-grandmother has dated it for me that way, Charles) your friends will descend upon you
chanting demands for action. Stan will have bet his shirt on Dorlig on the authority of this fiction-tale. He
will have won himself a nice piece of change. Harl will have bet more conservatively, but he'll be feeling
pretty good too. Only you will have been too obstinate to wager a single coin on the winning of that race.
And Ginny, knowing from the story what is to come next and halfway believing it, will be most especially
irresistible. They will arrive in a group, creating a tumult and demanding to be introduced to your
fifty-two-times-removed-great-grandfather. And you will growl at them and take them furiously down
into the rumpus-room to prove to them that they are half-wits. Which they are not.
I would like to draw a dramatic picture of two concurrent scenes, here, of the events taking place at
two so-widely-separated spots. In the physics lab of Collins University, away back in the twentieth
century, I sat. Joe had gone plodding over to a hardware store to buy a hank of sash cord. I wouldn't
trust to the string that had sufficed for Norton. I sat in the dusty, hot laboratory, listening to the buzzing of
a fly, and Norton, snoring off in the corner, and the gay laughter of bespectacled schoolteachers being
charming and girlish out on the campus. All was peace. All was tranquility. I was genuinely thrilled by
what had happened to Norton and was about to happen to me, but I didn't know Ginny was in my
immediate future. If I had, I'd have been in a hurry.
And far, far away in time, you, Charles, scowlingly led a gay party down into your family's
rumpus-room. Its walls glowed faintly with the changing forms and movements of the dynamic
decorations. You picked out those decorations, and they are pretty corny. That sequence in which a
spacesuited figure with your face slaughters grymvals тАФthe batlike things with jet propulsionтАФwhile a
rather sappy-looking blonde watches admiringly. That smacks of vainglory, but let it go.