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

You showed them the rumpus-room, conspicuously bereft of me. LakiтАФa nice girl, Laki, if you go
for brunettesтАФgiggled excitedly.
Stan poured coins cheerfully from one hand to another to show you how dumb you were not to be
on a sure thing straight from your great-etc.-grandfather's own lips. Hari jingled coins, a bit rueful for not
having bet with more nerve. And Ginny waited radiantly to see the man whom she knew from this letter
was going to take her back to the strange, remote, primitive days when pictures were two-dimensional
and all the food that people ate was grown in fields right here on Earth.
Ginny wore green, with a necklace of glittering synthetic stonesтАФnot valuable, only carbon
crystalsтАФabout her neck. Her tiny feetтАФbut why should I describe Ginny to you, Charles? You've seen
her, and you probably have a hard enough time following these ideas without being disconcerted by
Ginny. The marvelous thing about Ginny was her superb confidence of knowing exactly how I was going
to feel about her (indirectly, in my own clever way, I'm telling her now) plus the satisfaction that I did not
know anything about it yet. Because, of course, when all this happens, none of it will have taken place so
far as I am concernedтАФif you grasp my meaningтАФand I'm going to write this letter afterward, but Ginny
is going to read it ahead of time. I tenderly hope this doesn't make you dizzy, Charles. You will need to
be your usual, absent-minded self. A tense pause occurred.
Back in the physics laboratory Joe returned with the sash cord. There were more cries of merry
laughter out on the campus. Flies buzzed on and Norton dreamed of cocktails and sardine canapes. All
was peace. The world trundled on, unaware of the unparalleled and never-to-be-duplicated event about
to take place.
It was a tense moment indeed. We prepared for my splendid journey. I cut off a length of sash cord.
Then I felt Joe hauling at my belt. He was tying the other end of the sash cord to it. He'd accomplished it
when I realized. But I objected. I would trust my pants to a belt, but not my life. I hadn't lost my nerve,
but I wasn't going to take any unnecessary chances, either. I tied my end of the sash cord around my
ankle with a firm, double-knotted diamond hitch.
Then I said, "Tie the other end to something, Joe."
I watched him tie the cord's end firmly to a steam-radiator.
I felt prickles down my spine, but I said, "I will not let Norton lead where I dare not follow! Let'er
go, Joe!"
And Joe retreated to the extension-cord switch. He gulped, and looked unhappy, and threw the
switch over.
He and the laboratory, the floor, the ceiling, the steam-radiator and all the world I knew, vanished in
a luminous puce-colored mist. I stood still. Nothing happened. There I was. Apparently, that was all
there was to it. About me there was merely a brownish-purple nothing-in-particular. There was no sound
or movement of any sort. True, I no longer heard the glad cries of the summer-session school-teachers
on the campus, but aside from a feeling that I'd crawled into a puce-colored hole and pulled it in after me,
there was no sensation at all. I thought to look for the beer-bottle that had vanished permanently. I did
not see it. I did not see anything. I might as well be nowhere. I very probably was.
It did not strike me as high adventure. It did not really strike me as anything at all. I was distinctly
disappointed. I began to wish that Joe would haul on the sash cord tied to my ankle and get me out. Of
course I could have walked off in the mist to see if it was different anywhere else, but I had an innate
conviction that I'd better stay where I was. At that point I was very calm, Charles. Extremely calm. But
as minute after minute passed by and absolutely nothing happened, I began to sweat slightly.
I endured it as long as I could, and then I bent down and picked up the sash cord tied to my leg. I
waggled it, as a signal to Joe to pull me out of wherever I was, if anywhere. He did not respond. I pulled
on the cord, to stretch it taut so Joe would recognize that it was time for him to do something practical.
It didn't get taut. Because here, my dear Charles, I was faced with a small error of judgment on my
own part. But it was an error over which I shall rejoice forever. It was an inspired fuzzy-mindedness
which brought about the rest. When Joe and I were preparing for me to vanish in a puce-colored mist,
Charles, Joe had prepared to fasten the sash cord to my belt. It was not an especially sound idea, but I