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

Part 2. The Tuesday Me
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After breakfast, discovering that the rocket had acquired an
additional chunk of acceleration during the night, I took to leafing
through the ship's library, searching the textbooks for some way out
of this predicament. But I didn't find a thing. So I spread my star
map out on the table and in the light of nearby Betelgeuse, obscured
every so often by the orbiting sirloin, examined the area in which I
was located for the seat of some cosmic civilization that might
possibly come to my aid. But unfortunately this was a complete
stellar wilderness, avoided by all vessels as a region unusually
dangerous, for in it lay gravitational vortices, as formidable as
they were mysterious, one hundred and forty-seven of them in all,
whose existence was explained by six astrophysical theories, each
theory saying something different.
The cosmonautical almanac warned of them, in view of the
incalculable relativistic effects that passage through a vortex
could bring about--particularly when traveling at high velocities.
Yet there was little I could do. According to my calculations I
would be making contact with the edge of the first vortex at around
eleven, and therefore hurriedly prepared lunch, not wanting to face
the danger on an empty stomach. I had barely finished drying the
last saucer when the rocket began to pitch and heave in every
direction, till all the objects not adequately tied down went flying
from wall to wall like hail. With difficulty I crawled over to the
armchair, and after I'd lashed myself to it, as the ship tossed
about with ever increasing violence, I noticed a sort of pale lilac
haze forming on the opposite side of the cabin, and in the middle of
it, between the sink and the stove, a misty human shape, which had
on an apron and was pouring omelet batter into a frying pan. The
shape looked at me with interest, but without surprise, then
shimmered and was gone. I rubbed my eyes. I was obviously alone, so
attributed the vision to a momentary aberration.
As I continued to sit in--or rather, jump along with--the armchair,
it suddenly hit me, like a dazzling revelation, that this hadn't
been a hallucination at all. A thick volume of the General Theory of
Relativity came whirling past my chair and I grabbed for it, finally
catching it on the fourth pass. Turning the pages of that heavy tome
wasn't easy under the circumstances--awesome forces hurled the
rocket this way and that, it reeled like a drunken thing--but at
last I found the right chapter. It spoke of the manifestation of the
"time loop," that is, the bending of the direction of the flow of
time in the presence of gravitational fields of great intensity,
which phenomenon might even on occasion lead to the complete
reversal of time and the "duplication of the present." The vortex I
had just entered was not one of the most powerful. I knew that if I
could turn the ship's bow, even if only a little, towards the
Galactic Pole, it would intersect the so-called Vortex Gravitatiosus