"Lewis Padgett - Mimsy Were The Borogoves" - читать интересную книгу автора (Padgett Lewis)

MIMSY WERE THE BOROGOVES
by Lewis Paggett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore)

There's no use trying to describe either Unthahorsten or his surroundings,
because, for one thing, a good many million years had passed since 1942 Anno
Domini, and, for another, Unthahorsten wasn't on Earth, technically speaking. He
was doing the equivalent of standing in the equivalent of a laboratory. He was
preparing to test his time machine.
Having turned on the power, Unthahorsten suddenly realized that the Box was
empty. Which wouldn't do at all. The device needed a control, a three-dimensional
solid which would react to the conditions of another age. Otherwise Unthahorsten
couldn't tell, on the machine's return, where and when it had been. Whereas a solid in
the Box would automatically be subject to the entropy and cosmic ray bombardment
of the other era, and Unthahorsten could measure the changes, both qualitative and
quantitative, when the machine returned. The Calculators could then get to work and,
presently, tell Unthahorsten that the Box had briefly visited 1,000,000 A.D., 1,000
A.D., or 1 A.D., as the case might be.
Not that it mattered, except to Unthahorsten. But he was childish in many
respects.
There was little time to waste. The Box was beginning to glow and shiver.
Unthahorsten stared around wildly, fled into the next glossatch, and groped in a
storage bin there. He came up with an armful of peculiar-looking stuff. Uh-huh.
Some of the discarded toys of his son Snowen, which the boy had brought with him
when he had passed over from Earth, after mastering the necessary technique. Well,
Snowen needed this junk no longer. He was conditioned, and had put away childish
things. Besides, though Unthahorsten's wife kept the toys for sentimental reasons,
the experiment was more important.
Unthahorsten left the glossatch and dumped the assortment into the Box,
slamming the cover shut just before the warning signal flashed. The Box went away.
The manner of its departure hurt Unthahorsten's eyes.
He waited.
And he waited.
Eventually he gave up and built another time machine, with identical results.
Snowen hadn't been annoyed by the loss of his old toys, nor had Snowen's mother,
so Unthahorsten cleaned out the bin and dumped the remainder of his son's
childhood relics in the second time machine's Box.
According to his calculations, this one should have appeared on Earth, in the latter
part of the nineteenth century, A.D. If that actually occurred, the device remained
there.
Disgusted, Unthahorsten decided to make no more time machines. But the
mischief had been done. There were two of them, and the first...


Scott Paradine found it while he was playing hooky from the Glendale Grammar
School. There was a geography test that day, and Scott saw no sense in memorizing
place namesтАФwhich in 1942 was a fairly sensible theory. Besides, it was the sort of
warm spring day, with a touch of coolness in the breeze, which invited a boy to lie
down in a field and stare at the occasional clouds till he fell asleep. Nuts to
geography! Scott dozed.
About noon he got hungry, so his stocky legs carried him to a nearby store. There