"C. L. Moore - Tryst In Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

Tryst in Time

Eric Rosner at twenty had worked his way round the world on cattle boats,
killed his first man in a street brawl in Shanghai, escaped a firing squad by
a hairbreadth, stowed away on a pole-bound exploring ship.
At twenty-five he had lost himself in Siberian wilderness, led a troup of
Tatar bandits, commanded a Chinese regiment, fought in a hundred battles,
impartially on either side.
At thirty there was not a continent nor a capital that had not known him, not
a jungle nor a desert nor a mountain range that had not left scars upon his
great Viking body. Tiger claws and the Russian knout, Chinese bullets and the
knives of savage black warriors in African forests had written their tales of
a full and perilous life upon him. At thirty he looked backward upon such a
gorgeous, brawling, color-splashed career as few men of sixty can boast. But
at thirty he was not content.
Life had been full for him, and yet as the years passed he was becoming
increasingly aware of a need for something which those years were empty of.
What it was he did not know. He was not even consciously aware of missing
anything, but as time went on he turned more and more to a search for
something new-anything new. Perhaps it was his subconscious hunting blindly
for what life had lacked.
There was so very little that Eric Rosen had not done in his thirty riotous
years that the search for newness rapidly became almost feverish, and almost
in vain. Riches he had known, and poverty, much pleasure and much pain, and
the extremes of human experience were old tales to him. Ennui replaced the
zest for living that had sent him so gayly through the exultant years of his
youth. And for a man like Eric Rosner ennui was like a little death.
Perhaps, in part, all this was because he had missed love. No girl of all the
girls that had kissed him and adored him and wept when he
left them had mattered a snap of the fingers to Eric Rosner. He searched on
restlessly.
In this mood of feverish hunting for new things, he met the scientist, Walter
Dow. It happened casually, and they might never have met a second time had not
Eric said something offhand about the lack of adventure which life had to
offer a man. And Dow laughed.
"What do you know about adventure?" he demanded. He was a little man with a
shock of prematurely white hair and a face that crinkled into lines of
derision as he laughed. "You've spent your life among dangers and
gunfire-sure! But that's not real adventure. Science is the only field where
true adventure exists. I mean it! The things that are waiting to be discovered
offer fields of excitement like nothing you ever heard of. One man in a
lifetime couldn't begin to touch the edges of what there is to know. I tell
you I--"
"Oh, sure," interrupted Eric lazily. "I see what you mean. But all that's not
for me. I'm a man of action; I haven't any brains. Hunching over a microscope
isn't my idea of fun."


The argument that began then developed into a queer sort of antagonistic
friendship which brought the two men together very often in the weeks that