"Sean McMullen - Voice of Steel" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

"I cannot provide any theories about why a sword would say 'supermarket' in 1404," I admitted. "As for
the Tynedale brothers, I thought I knew everything about them, but this journal is new to me. Do you
have a family connectionтАФlike an ancestor of yours that was their patron?"

"Not that I know of. What can you tell me about them?"

"They were gunsmiths, although Edward was an alchemist as well. William had been apprenticed to a
jeweler as a boy, then he went on to make several crown-wheel escapement clocks. He had also
experimented with lenses, and constructed what he called a compound machine for drawing objects
large. If that machine was a telescope, then it was two centuries before the first telescope was supposed
to have been invented. If it was a compound lens microscope, well, they were still a long way ahead of
everyone else."

"So William was the brains of the family?"

"They were both bright, but William was the dreamer, while Edward did more of the management and
merchandising. They were brilliant, successful, and comfortably wealthy when that culverin exploded and
killed them. Had they even lived to their thirties, they might have revolutionised English science and
industry. This journal proves it beyond doubt. Notes on a working telescope, along with observations of
lunar craters and the moons of Jupiter. The design for an iron foundry, even the suggestion for an
'unsinkable' iron ship."

From my reading of the Tynedale Journal, I could imagine the consequences of the Tynedales living
another three or four decades and transforming English industry. The industrial revolution would have
taken place in the late 1500s rather than the late 1700s, for example, and William would have
transformed astronomy and physics two hundred years before Galileo. Where would humanity be by
now? A single, stylised portrait of William had survived, and I now opened a folder and showed a colour
print of it to Sir Steven. William had a dreamy look about him, yet he was well dressed and seemed quite
dynamic as well. I actually fancied him in an odd sort of way, and I had even dated a string of men who
resembled him. I did not let Sir Steven know any of that, however.

"This journal could be one of the greatest finds in the scientific history," I said as I gazed sadly at the page
open before me, shaking my head as I spoke.

"Could?" asked Sir Steven, who saw it as first rate publicity material to draw tourists to his estate.

"This word is definitely 'could', rather than 'is'. All that material on the Tynedale telescopes and iron
foundry designs is in the same journal as the words 'supermarket' and 'London Orbital'. Those words
brand the entire thing to be a fake."

"But we could get it dated. Don't they use carbon or something?"

"Yes, but even if the paper and ink was dated to around 1400, people would just say it was a clever
fake."

"And an obvious fake. I mean my wife radios me from her car nearly every day about supermarket
shopping or turning the oven on."

"Radio? As in cell phone?"