"Janet Morris - Crusaders In Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Janet E)

of time and the backward-moving arrow have collided in mid-air?"
I would say, Zeno replied very softly, "That you are better at creating
paradoxes than even I am. But since my clocks are not reading the time in
concert - not simultaneously, if I may add a loaded term to this discussion -
I will admit that there does - seem to be some disturbance in the procession
of time. In the length of what had previously and conveniently been uniform
instants. In the ... fabric of time itself."
The Devil nodded morosely. He looked at his hands between his knees and then
at his familiar, Michael, lapping from a bowl of milk which was still as full
as when the two men had started their conversation, or the creature had first
begun to lap. "I'm told that Hell is in danger of becoming temporally unstable
- of having no duration and all duration simultaneously, I ask you, Zeno of
Elea, is this a syllogism, or a real threat?"
Zeno had a sneaking suspicion that the Devil was trying to trap him into
speaking some blasphemy so terrible that it demanded infinite punishment of
indeterminate duration. He said slowly, "Sir Nick, if that were so then it
would always have been so - at least once it starts or started, or will start
So we wouldn't know the difference, since there would only be a single moment
in which to realize, cogitate, remember and predict Therefore, also, because
danger, is a transient condition which leads to a result, there could be no
peril in the true sense, because there would be insufficient duration to lead
to any denouement. , . no result no crisis or shift or event to which what the
New Dead call catastrophe math could apply. There could be no catastrophe
whatsoever, since there could not be, in an indivisible instant, any shift of
states - no events, if you like. There would be simply stasis, in which
everything poised to occur simultaneously, but nothing whatsoever did occur.
And stasis, of all states, demands the single condition consciousness cannot
meet peace. Thus, my answer is no, such a threat is not real, because such a
threat, if it became reality, would be imperceptible and so unreal. Unreal for
as long as there exists consciousness. And if consciousness does not exist,
then nothing--"
"Stop!" howled the Devil, his fists balled over his ears, his wig's flaps
pressed against them like earmuffs. "You know, you smartass word-monger, you
really do belong here! Some of them don't, Ill admit ... bureaucratic muck-ups
and the nature of big systems to malfunction. But you're as bad as Aristotle,
who told me that his precious geometry proved the threat false in as
masturbatory language as you're using."
"Sorry, Sir Nick, but you asked..."
"Asked!" This time, the yowl was so loud that Michael flattened himself before
the bowl of milk and began to choke. As Zeno watched, the cat/bat/familiar
seemed to bloat to twice its size as every hair stood on end. Its whole body
convulsed from back to front. Then, its neck stretched to double its former
length and its tongue sticking an inch out of its mouth, it vomited all the
milk it had drunk back into the bowl.
And this was a very interesting phenomenon, because the bowl was still full
before Michael began to vomit. And yet, as he vomited and after he vomited the
milk he'd drunk back into the bowl did not overflow. When the animal lay
exhausted and panting beside the bowl with its eyes glazed, having vomited
into the bowl the entire contents of its prodigious stomach, the bowl was
exactly, as full as it had been before the beast had begun vomiting. As, fall