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

sheet of slow glass. A new piece was always jet black because
nothing had yet come through, but one could stand the glass
beside, say, a woodland lake until the scene emerged, perhaps
a year later. If the glass was then removed and installed in a
dismal city flat, the flat wouldfor that yearappear to
overlook the woodland lake. During the year it wouldn't be
merely a very realistic but still picturethe water would
ripple in sunlight, silent animals would come to drink, birds
would cross the sky, night would follow day, season would
follow season. Until one day, a year later, the beauty held in
the subatomic pipelines would be exhausted and the familiar
gray cityscape would reappear.
Apart from its stupendous novelty value, the commercial
success of slow glass was founded on the fact that having a
scenedow was the exact emotional equivalent of owning land.
The meanest cave dweller could look out on misty parks
and who was to say they weren't his? A man who really owns
tailored gardens and estates doesn't spend his time proving his
ownership by crawling on his ground, feeling, smelling, tast-
ing it. All he receives from the land are light patterns, and
with scenedows those patterns could be taken into coal mines,
submarines, prison cells.
On several occasions I have tried to write short pieces
about the enchanted crystal but, to me, the theme is so
ineffably poetic as to be, paradoxically, beyond the reach of
poetrymine at any rate. Besides, the best songs and verse
had already been written, with prescient inspiration, by men
who had died long before slow glass was discovered. I had no
hope of equaling, for example, Moore with his:
Oft in the stilly night,
Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light,
Of other days around me . . .
It took only a few years for slow glass to develop from a
scientific curiosity to a sizable industry. And much to the
astonishment of we poetsthose of us who remain convinced
that beauty lives though lilies diethe trappings of that
industry were no different from those of any other. There
were good scenedows which cost a lot of money, and there
were inferior scenedows which cost rather less. The thiebiess,
measured in years, was an important factor in the cost but
there was also the question of actual thickness, or phase.
Even with the most sophisticated engineering techniques
available thickness control was something of a hit-and-miss
affair. A coarse discrepancy could mean that a pane intended
to be five years thick might be five and a half, so that light
which entered in summer emerged in winter; a fine discrep-
ancy could mean that noon sunshine emerged at midnight.
These incompatibilities had their peculiar charmmany night
workers, for example, liked having their own private time