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

offending anybody but the faculty and certain sensitive alumni. For a mere professor of
mathematics to make public the theory Minott had formed would not even be news. It would be taken
as stark insanity. Moreover, those who believed it would be scared. So he kept his mouth shut.
Professor Minott possessed courage, bitterness, and a certain cold-blooded daring, but
neither wealth nor influence. He had more than a little knowledge of mathematical physics and his
calculations show extraordinary knowledge of the laws of probability, but he had very little
patience with problems in ethics. And he was possessed by a particularly fierce passion for Maida
Hayns, daughter of the professor of Romance languages, and had practically no chance to win even
her attention over the competition of most of the student body. So much of explanation is
necessary, because no one but just such a person as Professor Minott would have forecast what was
to happen and then prepare for it in the fashion in which he did.
We know from his notes that he considered the probability of disaster as a shade better
than four to one. It is a very great pity that we do not have his calculations. There is much that
our scientists do not understand even yet. The notes Professor Minott left behind have been


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invaluable, but there are obvious gaps in them. He must have taken most of his notes-and those the
most valuable into that unguessed at place where he conceivably now lives and very probably works.
He would be amused, no doubt, at the diligence with which his most unconsidered scribble
is now examined and inspected and discussed by the greatest minds of our time and space. And
perhaps it is quite probable he may have invented a word for the scope of the catastrophe we
escaped. We have none as yet.
There is no word to describe a disaster in which not only the earth but our whole solar
system might have been destroyed; not only our solar system but our galaxy; not only our galaxy
but every other island universe in all of the space we know; more than that, the destruction of
all space as we know it; and even beyond that the destruction of time, meaning not only the
obliteration of present and future but even the annihilation of the past so that it would never
have been. And then, besides, those other strange states of existence we learned of, those other
universes, those other pasts and futures all to be shattered into'nothingness. There is no word
for such a catastrophe.
It would be interesting to know what Professor Minott termed it to himself, as he coolly
prepared to take advantage of the one chance in four of survival, if that should be the one to
eventuate. But it is easier to wonder how he felt on the evening before the fifth of June, in
1935. We do not know. We cannot know. All we can be certain of is how we felt and what happened.
It was half past seven a.m. of June 5, 1935. The city of Joplin, Missouri, awaked from, a
comfortable, summer-night sleep. Dew glistened upon grass blades and leaves and the filmy webs of
morning spiders glittered like diamond dust in the early sunshine. In the most easternly suburb a
high-school boy, yawning, came somnolently out of his house to mow the lawn before schooltime. A
rather rickety family car roared, a block away. It backfired, stopped, roared again, anti
throttled down to a steady, waiting hum. Then, voices of children sounded among the houses. A
colored washerwoman appeared, striding beneath the trees which lined this strictly residential
street.
From an upper window a radio blatted: "one, two, three, four! Higher, now three, four! Put
your weight into it! two, three, four!" The radio suddenly squawked and began to emit an
insistent, mechanical shriek which changed again to a squawk and then a terrific sound as of all
the static of ten thousand thunderstorms on the air at once. Then it was silent.
The high-school boy leaned mournfully on the pushbar of the lawn mower. At the instant the