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

"Perfectly normal, doctor. I just gave them their three o'clock feeding and
they're asleep now."
"Do they seem happy?" inquired Ashley solicitously.
"That's right, scoff," sighed Bill. "Those pups and I will go ringing down the
corridors of time, you mark my words."


Ashley nodded, half seriously. He knew it might well be true. The pups were
the living proof of Bill's success in prenatal sex determination-six litters
of squirming maleness with no female among them. They represented the fruit of
long, painstaking experiments in the X-ray bombardment of chromosomes to
separate and identify the genes carrying the factors of sex determination, of
countless failures and immeasurable patience. If the pups grew into normal
dogs-well, it would be one long, sure stride nearer the day when, through
Bill's own handiwork, the world would be perfectly balanced between male and
female in exact proportion to the changing need.
Miss Brown vanished with a shy, self-effacing smile. As the door
closed behind her, Ashley, who had been regarding the two photograph cubes on
Bill's desk with a lifted eyebrow, arranged his long length on the couch
against the wall and was heard to murmur:
"Eenie-.meenie-minie-mo. Which is it going to be, Wil-yum?"
They were on terms too intimate for Bill to misunderstand, or pretend to.
"I don't know," he admitted miserably, glancing down in some hesitation at the
letter beginning, "My darling Sallie-"
Ashley yawned again and fumbled for a cigarette. "You know," he murmured
comfortably, "it's interesting to speculate on your possible futures. With
Marta or Sallie, I mean. Maybe some day somebody will find a way to look ahead
down the branching paths of the future and deliberately select the turning
points that will carry him toward the goal he chooses. Now if you could know
beforehand where life with Sallie would lead, or life with Marta, you might
alter the whole course of human history. That is, if you're half as important
as you think you are."
"Huh-uh," grunted Bill. "If you predicate a fixed future, then it's fixed
already, isn't it? And you'd have no real choice."
Ashley scratched a match deliberately and set his cigarette aglow before he
said: "I think of the future as an infinite reservoir of an infinite number of
futures, each of them fixed, yet maleable as clay. Do you see what I mean? At
every point along our way we confront crossroads at which we make choices
among the many possible things we may do the next moment. Each crossroad leads
to a different future, all of them possible, all of them fixed, waiting for
our choice to give them reality. Perhaps there's a-call it a Plane of
Probability-where all these possible results of our possible choices exist
simultaneously. Blueprints of things to come. When the physical time of matter
catches up with, and fills in, any one particular plan, it becomes fixed in
the present.
"But before time has caught up with it, while our choice at the crossroads is
still unmade, an infinite number of possible futures must exist as it were in
suspension, waiting for us in some unimaginable, dimensionless infinity. Can
you imagine what it would be like to open a window upon that Probability
Plane, look out into the infinities of the future, trace the consequences of