"Murray Leinster - Sidewise in Time (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

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Sidewise in Time



FOREWORD



LOOKING BACK, IT seems strange that no one but Professor Minott figured the thing out in advance.
The indications were more than plain, In early December of 1934 Professor Michaelson announced his
finding that the speed of light was not an absolute could not be considered invariable. That, of
course, was one of the first indications of what was to happen.
A second indication came on February 15th, when at 12:40 p.m., Greenwich mean time, the
sun suddenly shone blue-white and the enormously increased rate of radiation raised the
temperature of the earth's surface by twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit in five minutes. At the end of
the five minutes, the sun went back to its normal rate of radiation without any other symptom of
disturbance.
A great many bids for scientific fame followed, of course, but no plausible explanation of
the phenomenon accounted for a total lack of after disturbances in the sun's photosphere.
For a third clear forerunner of the events of June, on March 10th the male giraffe in the
Bronx Zoological Park, in New York, ceased to eat. In the nine days following, it changed its
form, absorbing all its extremities, even its neck and head, into an extraordinary, eggshaped mass
of still-living flesh and bone which on the tenth day began to divide spontaneously and on the
twelfth was two slightly pulsating fleshy masses.
A day later still, bumps appeared on the two masses. They grew, took form and design, and
twenty days after the beginning of the phenomenon were legs, necks, and heads. Then two giraffes,
both male, moved about the giraffe enclosure. Each was slightly less than half the weight of the
original animal. They were identically marked. And they ate and moved and in every way seemed
normal though immature animals.
An exactly similar occurrence was reported from the Argentine Republic, in which a steer
from the pampas was going through the same extraordinary method of reproduction under the critical
eyes of Argentine scientists.
Nowadays it seems incredible that the scientists of 1935 should not have understood the
meaning of these oddities. We now know something of the type of strain which produced them, though
they no longer occur. But between January and June of 1935 the news service's of the nation were
flooded with items of similar import.
For two days the Ohio River flowed upstream. For six hours the trees in Euclid Park, in
Cleveland, lashed their branches madly as if in a terrific storm, though not a breath of wind was
stirring. And in New Orleans, near the last of May, fishes swam up out of the Mississippi River
through the air, proceeded to "drown" in the air which inexplicably upheld them, and then turned
belly up and floated placidly at an imaginary water level some fifteen feet above the pavements of
the city.
But it seems clear that Professor Minott was the only man In the world who even guessed
the - meaning of these_Lto us-clear-cut indications of the later events. Professor Minott was
instructor in mathematics on the faculty of Robinson College in Fredericksburg, Va. We know that
he anticipated very nearly every one of the things which later startled and frightened the world,
and not only our world. But he kept his mouth shut.
Robinson College was small. It had even been termed a "jerkwater". college without