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

he invested his small hoard with penurious care and a sublime disregard for his
gastric juices. He went down by the creek to feed.
Having finished his supply of cheese, chocolate, and cookies, and having drained
the soda-pop bottle to its dregs, Scott caught tadpoles and studied them with a
certain amount of scientific curiosity. He did not persevere. Something tumbled
down the bank and thudded into the muddy ground near the water, so Scott, with a
wary glance around, hurried to investigate.
It was a box. It was, in fact, the Box. The gadgetry hitched to it meant little to
Scott, though he wondered why it was so fused and burnt. He pondered. With his
jackknife he pried and probed, his tongue sticking out from a corner of his
mouthтАФHm-m-m. Nobody was around. Where had the box come from? Somebody
must have left it here, and sliding soil had dislodged it from its precarious perch.
"That's a helix," Scott decided, quite erroneously. It was helical, but it wasn't a
helix, because of the dimensional warp involved. Had the thing been a model
airplane, no matter how complicated, it would have held few mysteries to Scott. As
it was, a problem was posed. Something told Scott that the device was a lot more
complicated than the spring motor he had deftly dismantled last Friday.
But no boy has ever left a box unopened, unless forcibly dragged away. Scott
probed deeper. The angles on this thing were funny. Short circuit, probably. That
was whyтАФuh! The knife slipped, Scott sucked his thumb and gave vent to
experienced blasphemy.
Maybe it was a music box.
Scott shouldn't have felt depressed. The gadgetry would have given Einstein a
headache and driven Steinmetz raving mad. The trouble was, of course, that the box
had not yet completely entered the space-time continuum where Scott existed, and
therefore it could not be opened. At any rate, not till Scott used a convenient rock to
hammer the helical non-helix into a more convenient position.
He hammered it, in fact, from its contact point with the fourth dimension, releasing
the space-time torsion it had been maintaining. There was a brittle snap. The box
jarred slightly and lay motionless, no longer only partially in existence. Scott opened
it easily now.
The soft, woven helmet was the first thing that caught his eye, but he discarded
that without much interest. It was just a cap. Next he lifted a square, transparent
crystal block, small enough to cup in his palmтАФmuch too small to contain the maze
of apparatus within it. In a moment Scott had solved that problem. The crystal was a
sort of magnifying glass, vastly enlarging the things inside the block. Strange thing
they were, too. Miniature people, for example.
They moved. Like clockwork automatons, though much more smoothly. It was
rather like watching a play. Scott was interested in their costumes but fascinated by
their actions. The tiny people were deftly building a house. Scott wished it would
catch fire, so he could see the people put it out.
Flames licked up from the half-completed structure. The automatons, with a great
deal of odd apparatus, extinguished the blaze.
It didn't take Scott long to catch on. But he was a little worried. The mannequins
would obey his thoughts. By the time he discovered that, he was frightened, and
threw the cube from him.
Halfway up the bank, he reconsidered and returned. The crystal block lay partly in
the water, shining in the sun. It was a toy; Scott sensed that, with the unerring instinct
of a child. But he didn't pick it up immediately. Instead, he returned to the box and
investigated its remaining contents.