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

married to Ginny. Lately it's gotten even better. And she came in with something to show me that enables
me to finish this note with an item of news that is highly important to all the family.
Ginny, beaming, took my finger and made me feel. And it's so! We have a son, Charles. He looks
like me, but Ginny seems pleased. And the thing I feltтАФCharles, just as I finished this letter, Ginny
showed me that your great-great-great-grandfather fifty-one times removed, at the age of seven months
and one week, has just cut his first tooth!
I'm sure you will be pleased!
 Gateway To Elsewhere


Chapter 1

This is the story of what happened to Tony Gregg after he had learned about the fourth
dimensionтАФor maybe it was the fifth or sixthтАФin a shishkebab restaurant in the Syrian quarter on lower
East Broadway, New York.
He didn't go to the restaurant originally to learn about the fourth dimension. His first visit was simply
for shishkebab, which is a wonderful dish of lamb cubes skewered on small round sticks and cooked
with an unlikely sauce containing grape leaves. It was quite accidental that he asked the owner of the
restaurant about a coin that heтАФTonyтАФcarried as a luck-piece.
Tony had bought it for a lucky charm in one of those tiny shops on side-streets in New York, where
antique jewelry and ivory chessmen and similar wares are on display in the windows. He picked it out
because it looked odd. His conscienceтАФhe had been raised with a very articulate
conscienceтАФreluctantly consented to the purchase because the coin was very heavy for its size and might
be gold. (It certainly wasn't a medal, and therefore had to be a coin.) It bore an inscription in
conventionalized Arabic script on one side, and something on the other that looked like an elaborate
throne without anybody sitting on it. But when Tony tried to look it up, there simply wasn't any record in
any numismatic catalogue of any coinage even resembling it.
One nightтАФthis was his first visit, not the later one when he learned about the fourth dimensionтАФhe
went down on East Broadway for shishkebab, and it occurred to him to ask the Syrian
restaurant-keeper what the Arabic inscription might say. The Syrian read it, frowned darkly, and told
Tony that the coin was a ten-dirhim piece, that the inscription said it was a coin of Barkutand, that he had
never heard of any place called Barkut. Neither had Tony. So Tony got a little curious about it, and the
next day spent half an hour in the Fifth Avenue library trying to find out something about either the coin or
the country it came from. But as far as the library was concerned, there wasn't any place called Barkut.
Never had been.
The coin was solid gold, though. A jeweler verified that. At bullion, it was worth somewhere around
six dollars. And since Tony had paid only a dollar and a half for it, he was rather pleased. Even his
conscience smugly approved. It isn't often that you pick up anything in an antique shop that you can sell
for more than you paid for it, no matter what people tell you. So Tony kept it for a luck-piece, and every
night on the way home from the office he paused outside Paddy Scanlon's Bar and Grill and gravely
tossed the coin to see whether he should have a drink or not. Which was a pretty good way of being
neither too abstemious nor too regular in such matters. His conscience approved of this, too.
He didn't really think the coin brought him good luck, but the small mystery of it intrigued him. He
was a rather ordinary young man, was Tony. He'd enlisted in the Second World War, but had never got
beyond a base camp although he'd howled for action. Instead, he sat on his rear and pounded a
typewriter for three long years. Then he was discharged and got his old job backтАФat the same old
salaryтАФand went back to his old lodging houseтАФat a bright new rate per week. Kind of a sour deal all
around. So now he was glad he had the coinтАФbecause he liked to imagine things. His conscience sternly
and constantly reminded him that he should be polite, attentive to his duties, efficient and no
clock-watcher; and the radio reminded him every morning while he was dressing that he'd better use a