"Murray Leinster - Time Tunnel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

The affair of the time-tunnel began, so far as
Harrison was concerned, with a series of events so im-
probable as to seem lunacy, but which appear to have been
inevitable. In a cosmos designed to have human beings
live in it, though, there would have to be some sort of
safeguards against the consequences of their idiocy. The
time-tunnel may have been such a safeguard. To some
people, that seems a reasonable guess.

It was a brisk, sunshiny Parisian afternoon when the
matter really turned up. Harrison sat at a sidewalk table
outside the little cafe in the Rue Flamel. He'd never hap-
pened to notice its name. He sipped at an aperitif, thinking
hard and trying not to believe what he was thinking about.
He'd come from the Bibliotheque Nationale a good how
before. Today he'd found more of the completely incred-
ible. He didn't believe it, but he knew it was true.
His series of discoveries had reached the point where he
simply couldn't tell himself any longer that they were
coincidences. They weren't. And their implications were
of a kind to make cold chills run up and down anybody's
spine. A really sensible man would have torn up his notes,
gotten drunk to confuse his memories, and then departed
7 -
on the earliest possible plane for home. There he would
have denied to himself forever after that he had found
what Harrison had discovered in the dusty manuscript
section of the Bibliotheque Nationale.
But Harrison sipped at a drink and noted the small
cold chills running up and down his spine. He resented them
because he didn't believe in what caused them. But there
they were. They had to do with the cosmos in general.
Most men develop convictions about the cosmos and such
beliefs come in two varieties. One kind is a conviction
that the cosmos does not make sense. That it exists by
chance and changes by chance and human beings do not
matter. This view produces a fine complacency. The other
kind is a belief that the cosmos does make sense, and was
designed with the idea that people were going to live in
it, and that what they do and what happens to them is
important. This theory seems to be depressing.
Harrison had accepted the second view, but he was
beginning to be frightened because of what he'd found in
dusty, quill-pen-written pages in a library reading room.
And he didn't like to be frightened.
It was a very pleasant autumn afternoon, though. Leaves
had been falling, and they blew erratically about the pave-
ment in appropriate fall colorings, and the sky showed
through the nearly denuded branches of the trees that