"03.Time Streams" - читать интересную книгу автора (McGough Scott)

the floor, he watched Malzra and Barrin.
Barrin used the same hooked pole to trigger a hidden
panel in the floor. A trefoil section of stone shifted
aside, and an array of consoles rose into the room. Copper
coils and pulsing tubes spilled from beneath the control
panels. Barrin checked the various conduits where they
connected with the floor. Malzra meanwhile worked
adjustments to levers and switches.
Fluids began to move through the tubes. A low hum
started among the great glass cylinders. Brass fittings
buzzed. Even the dome itself rumbled with the mounting
sound.
A high-pitched whine rose to echo through the lab, and a
thin red beam stabbed from the base of the machine. It
lanced through the charged air, just past the silver man's
shoulder, and neatly struck the circle scribed on the floor.
The ray fluttered a moment before sweeping in an arc. It
looped the golem once and sped in its course. In moments,
the single spinning beam had widened into a crimson cone
that enveloped him.
The silver man stood there, bathed in lurid light,
watching his creators. The men were busy at their consoles,
drawing up one energy source and leveling off another,
directing the beam in its spiraling crescendo, configuring
the coordinates of space and time.... Light intensified. The
artificers' endeavors slowed. The whining hum reached a
peak. Master Malzra and Barrin soon moved not at all, frozen
in space ... or time.
The probe understood. The roaring machine and its
whirring cone of light had teased the cord of time down to a
frayed nub, and then to nothing. With rising fury, the
device plucked at the packed skein of past moments. They too
began to unravel. No longer motionless, Master Malzra and
Barrin moved backward, undoing all they had done. Their arms
darted with strange jabs like scorpion tails. More than
that, the silver man also moved, or his past self moved. It
trudged backward out of the circle just as he had trudged
forward into it, only minutes before.
Within the cone of regression, the present-time silver
man watched in amazement. His doppelganger conferred with
Malzra and Barrin. Their words were lost to the hum of the
machine, but the sense of them was clear-reversed syllables
that did not inform or enlighten but rather disinformed and
obscured. All the while they spoke, the ghost golem knew
less and less, and the ghost time machine retracted into the
dome above. When the brief conference was done, the past-
time golem staggered backward toward the door, ignorant of
the hidden machine and all that had been said.
The regression accelerated. Barrin and Malzra scuttled
backward about the room, dismantling things, forgetting