"C. L. Moore - Greater Than Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

a window into the Thirtieth, talking with the unborn descendant of his yet
unconceived son. For this moment it was all accomplished reality, a very
magnificent and blood-stirring present achieved directly through his own
efforts.
"Father. . . father!" The voice was sweet and high in the core of his brain.
And memory came back in an overwhelming rush that for an instant drowned out
everything but a father's awareness of special love for a favorite daughter.
"Yes, Susan - - . yes, dear." He murmured it aloud, swinging around toward the
cube that housed his other future. Sue leaned forward upon her knees among the
myrtle leaves, her brown eyes wide and a little frightened upon his. There was
a crease between her winged brows that dented Bill's own forehead as he faced
her. For a moment it was almost as if each of them looked into a mirror which
reflected the features of the other, identical in nearly every detail. Then
Sallie's smile dimpled the cheeks of her far-descended daughter, and Sue
laughed a small, uneasy laugh.
"What is it, father? Is something wrong?"
He opened his lips to speak-but what could he say? What could he possibly say
to her, who did not even dream that her own time was anything but inevitable?
How could he explain to a living, warmly breathing woman that she did not
exist, might never exist?
He stared at her unhappily, groping for words he could not find. But before he
spoke- "Dr. Cory, sir- Is anything wrong?" He turned back to Billy with a
harried crease between his brows and then stared wildly from one face to the
other. How could they help hearing one another? But obviously Billy, from his
window into the present, saw simply the cube that held Sallie's immortal
smile, while Sue, from hers, looked upon Marta's changeless face. It seemed to
Bill that the boy and the girl had spoken in voices almost identical, using
words nearly the same, though neither was aware of the other. How could they
be? They
could not even exist simultaneously in the same world. He might have one of
these beloved children or the other; not both. Equally beloved children,
between whom he must choose-and how could he choose?
"Father-" said Sue on a rising inflection of alarm. "There is something wrong.
I. . . feel it in your mind- Oh, what is it, father?"
Bill sat speechless, staring from one face to the other of these mutually
exclusive children. Here they stood, with their worlds behind them, looking
anxiously at him with the same little crease between the brows of each. And he
could not even speak to either without convincing the other he was a madman
talking to empty air. He wanted insanely to laugh. It was a deadlock beyond
all solution. Yet he must answer them-he must make his choice- As he sat there
groping in vain for words, a curious awareness began
to take shape in his mind. How strange it was that these two should have been
the ones to reach him, out of all the generations behind each that had been
searching the past. And why had they established contact at so nearly the same
time, when they had all his life span to grope through, hunting him for such
different reasons, in such different ways? There was more than accident here,
if all this were not a dream- Billy and Sue-so similar despite the wide
divergence of their
words, a wider divergence than the mind can well grasp, for how can one
measure the distance between mutually incompatible things? Billy who was all