"Lem - Seventh Voyage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

crawled out from under the bed.
"If you're the Sunday me, where's your spacesuit?!" I cried, struck
by a new thought.
"I'll have it in a minute," he said calmly, and then I noticed the
pipe in his hand...The next thing I saw was a bright flash, like a
few dozen supernovas going off at once, after which I lost
consciousness.



Part 7. A Committee of Me
Back to: TOC | Lem
I came to, sitting on the floor of the bathroom; someone was banging
on the door. I began to attend to my bruises and bumps, but he kept
pounding away; it turned out to be the Wednesday me. After a while I
showed him my battered head, he went with the Thursday me for the
tools, then there was a lot of running around and yanking off of
spacesuits, this too in one way or another I managed to live
through, and on Saturday morning crawled under the bed to see if
there wasn't some chocolate left in the suitcase. Someone started
pulling at my foot as I ate the last bar, which I'd found underneath
the shirts; I no longer knew just who this was, but hit him over the
head any how, pulled the spacesuit off him and was going to put it
on--when the rocket fell into the next vortex.
When I regained consciousness, the cabin was packed with people.
There was barely elbowroom. As it turned out, they were all of them
me, from different days, weeks, months, and one--so he said--was
even from the following year. There were plenty with bruises and
black eyes, and five among those present had on spacesuits. But
instead of immediately going out through the hatch and repairing the
damage, they began to quarrel, argue, bicker and debate. The problem
was, who had hit whom, and when. The situation was complicated by
the fact that there now had appeared morning me's and afternoon
me's--I feared that if things went on like this, I would soon be
broken into minutes and seconds--and then too, the majority of the
me's present were lying like mad, so that to this day I'm not
altogether sure whom I hit and who hit me when that whole business
took place, triangularly, between the Thursday, the Friday and the
Wednesday me's, all of whom I was in turn. My impression is that
because I had lied to the Friday me, pretending to be the Sunday me,
I ended up with one blow more than I should have, going by the
calendar. But I would prefer not to dwell any longer on these
unpleasant memories; a man who for an entire week does nothing but
hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud.
Meanwhile the arguments continued. The sight of such inaction, such
wasting of precious time, drove me to despair, while the rocket
rushed blindly on, straight ahead, plunging every now and then into
another gravitational vortex. At last the ones wearing spacesuits
started slugging it out with the ones who were not. I tried to
introduce some sort of order into that absolute chaos and finally,