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

"Plenty. I shall have read out my own name during the transmission. It should show up in this journal. If it
does, no French conspiracy."

Steven leafed through the pages, smirking. Whoever had made the transmission that William had
transcribed had been besotted with him. She had described herself as a scholar, and later as a teacher of
youths and girls. Much of her transmission was embarrassingly personal and mawkishly sentimental, yet I
had a curious sympathy for her. I had decided to become a scientist after reading his biography at the age
of twelve. I drew curious satisfaction from the fact that he had never married, and as a teenager I often
fantasised that he had been saving himself for me. I dreamed of inventing a time machine and travelling
back to the early fifteenth century to meet him. When I married Steven I almost felt as if I was betraying
William Tynedale, and that his spirit would be watching sadly as I forsook him for someone else.

"But if the Tynedales really did get all their science from the future, well, Britannic science and engineering
would be discredited anyway," said Steven, sounding almost serious.

"Ah, but we don't have to publish," I pointed out.

The Don Alverin sword was known to be a crystal, and Steven kept a radio transmitter in the manor
house to demonstrate it to guests at dinner parties. It took me an hour or so to gather together some
notes and draw up a programme for the transmission. William Tynedale's face stared out from a
six-hundred-year-old portrait on the wall. His good looks showed through, in spite of the rather primitive
late-medieval style of the artist. Steven was asleep by now, with a half-empty decanter or port on the
coffee table beside his chair. I switched on the little radio transmitter.

"William Tynedale, this is a message for you from six hundred years in the future. My name is Michelle
Evelene Watson, and I am six hundred years in your future. As I sit here, I see your portrait on the wall,
and your books are piled high around me. I know you so well that I have fallen in love with you, yet you
do not know me at all. I have auburn hair, reaching to my shoulders, I am about your height, and I am
thirty-five years of age as I sit here, speaking to you. Strange, is it not? I am thirty-five, yet I am not yet
born, I am dead and long buried, and a gawky adolescent, all in your future. I wish to add to the
principles spoken to you and your brother тАж"

I hesitated. Who had done the earlier transmissions in the journal. Perhaps an alternative me? A Michelle
Watson who no longer existed? Certainly the man had shaped my life. In a way he meant more to me
than Steven.

"First, I declare it true that the true speed of light is sufficient to cover one hundred and eighty-six
thousand miles in the interval between two heartbeats of a man at rest. The speed of sound is much
slower, being about thirty times more than a fit man might run тАж"

The transmission took some time. I had to speak slowly so that William might copy everything down
correctly, and I had to be very careful to phrase everything so that an educated person in the fifteenth
century could understand what I was saying if he thought about it for long enough. Finally I finished my
strangely primitive dissertation on modern science, thumbed the transmitter off, stretched, then picked up
the journal. It certainly was a contradiction of scholarship, yet my name appeared there. Not my rank,
however. That made me suspicious. I would never give my name without my rank. My rank defined my
position in the fleet, in a way my rank defined my existence. Still, there was my name between two
detailed dissertations on science тАж yet some of it was science such as had never existed. Faraday's Law
of Relativity? Lord Isaac Newton had discovered his Principle of Relativity in the seventeenth century.