"Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 2)

been saying. His price had been much higher than I had
hopedbut ten years thick! The cheap glass one found in
places like the Vistaplex and Pane-o-rama stores usually
consisted of a quarter of an inch of ordinary glass faced with
a veneer of slow glass perhaps only ten or twelve months
thick.
"You don't understand, darling," I said, already determined
to buy. "This glass will last ten years and it's in phase."
"Doesn't that only mean it keeps time?"
Hagan smiled at her again, realizing he had no further
necessity' to bother with me. "Only, you say! Pardon me, Mrs.
Garland, but you don't seem to appreciate the miracle, the
genuine honest-to-goodness miracle, of engineering precision
needed to produce a piece of glass in phase. When I say the
glass is ten years thick it means it takes light ten years to pass
through it. In effect, each one of those panes is ten light-years
thickmore than twice the distance to the nearest starso a
variation in actual thickness of only a millionth of an inch
would ..."
He stopped talking for a moment and sat quietly looking
towards the house. I turned my head from the view of the
Loch and saw the young woman standing at the window
again. Hagan's eyes were filled with a kind of greedy rever-
ence which made me feel uncomfortable and at the same time
convinced me Selina had been wrong. In my experience
husbands never looked at wives that way, at least, not at their
own.
The girl remained in view for a few seconds, dress glowing
warmly, then moved back into the room. Suddenly I received
a distinct, though inexplicable, impression she was blind. My
feeling was that Selina and I were perhaps blundering through
an emotional interplay as violent as our own.
"I'm sorry," Hagan continued, "I thought Rose was going
to call me for something. Now, where was I, Mrs. Garland?
Ten light-years compressed into a quarter of an inch
means..."
I ceased to listen, partly because I was already sold, partly
because I had heard the story of slow glass many times before
and had never yet understood the principles involved. An
acquaintance with scientific training had once tried to be
helpful by telling me to visualize a pane of slow glass as a
hologram which did not need coherent light from a laser for
the reconstitution of its visual information, and in which
every photon of ordinary light passed through a spiral tunnel
coiled outside the radius of capture of each atom in the glass.
This gem of, to me, incomprehensibility not only told me
nothing, it convinced me once again that a mind as nontechni-
cal as mine should concern itself less with causes than effects.
The most important effect, in the eyes of the .average
individual, was that light took a long time to pass through a