"Lewis Padgett - The Twonky" - читать интересную книгу автора (Padgett Lewis)

THE TWONKY
by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore)

File name: Lewis Padgett - The Twonky 1.0.txt
Scanned from "Line to Tomorrow" (Bantam Books, August 1954) by drOrlof
First published in "Astounding Science Fiction", September 1942 (ed. John W. Campbell, Jr)


THE TURNOVER at Mideastern Radio was so great that Mickey Lloyd couldn't keep track of his men. Employees kept quitting and going elsewhere, at a higher salary. So when the big-headed little man in overalls wandered vaguely out of a storeroom, Lloyd took one look at the brown dungaree suitЧcompany providedЧand said mildly, "The whistle blew half an hour ago. Hop to work."
"Work-k-k?" The man seemed to have trouble with the word.
Drunk? Lloyd, in his capacity as foreman, couldn't permit that. He flipped away his cigarette, walked forward, and sniffed. No, it wasn't liquor. He peered at the badge on the man's overalls.
"Two-o-four, m-mm. Are you new here?"
"New. Huh?" The man rubbed a rising bump on his forehead. He was an odd-looking little chap, bald as a vacuum tube, with a pinched, pallid face and tiny eyes that held dazed wonder.
"Come on, Joe. Wake up!" Lloyd was beginning to sound impatient. "You work here, don't you?"
"Joe," said the man thoughtfully. "Work. Yes, I work. I make them." His words ran together oddly, as though he had a cleft palate.
With another glance at the badge, Lloyd gripped Joe's arm and ran him through the assembly room. "Here's your place. Hop to it. Know what to do?"
The other drew his scrawny body erect. "I amЧexpert," he remarked. "Make them better than Ponthwank."
"O.K.," Lloyd said. "Make 'em, then." And he went away.
The man called Joe hesitated, nursing the bruise on his head. The overalls caught his attention, and he examined them wonderingly. WhereЧoh, yes. They had been hanging in the room from which he had first emerged. His own garments had, naturally, dissipated during the tripЧwhat trip?
Amnesia, he thought. He had fallen from the . . . the something . . . when it slowed down and stopped. How odd this huge, machine-filled barn looked! It struck no chord of remembrance.
Amnesia, that was it. He was a worker. He made things. As for the unfamiliarity of his surroundings, that meant nothing. He was still dazed. The clouds would lift from his mind presently. They were beginning to do that already.
Work. Joe scuttled around the room, trying to goad his faulty memory. Men in overalls were doing things. Simple, obvious things. But how childishЧhow elemental! Perhaps this was a kindergarten.
After a while Joe went out into a stock room and examined some finished models of combination radio-phonographs. So that was it. Awkward and clumsy, but it wasn't his place to say so. No. His job was to make Twonkies.
Twonkies? The name jolted his memory again. Of course he knew how to make Twonkies. He'd made them all his lifeЧhad been specially trained for the job. Now they were using a different model of Twonky, but what the hell! Child's play for a clever workman.
Joe went back into the shop and found a vacant bench. He began to build a Twonky. Occasionally he slipped off and stole the material he needed. Once, when he couldn't locate any tungsten, he hastily built a small gadget and made it.
His bench was in a distant corner, badly lighted, though it seemed quite bright to Joe's eyes. Nobody noticed the console that was swiftly growing to completion there. Joe worked very, very fast. He ignored the noon whistle, and, at quitting time, his task was finished. It could, perhaps, stand another coat of paint; it lacked the Shimmertone of a standard Twonky. But none of the others had Shimmertone. Joe sighed, crawled under the bench, looked in vain for a relaxopad, and went to sleep on the floor.
A few hours later he woke up. The factory was empty. Odd! Maybe the working hours had changed. MaybeЧJoe's mind felt funny. Sleep had cleared away the mists of amnesia, if such it had been, but he still felt dazed.
Muttering under his breath, he sent the Twonky into the stock room and compared it with the others. Superficially it was identical with a console radio-phonograph combination of the latest model. Following the pattern of the others, Joe had camouflaged and disguised the various organs and reactors.
He went back into the shop. Then the last of the mists cleared from his mind. Joe's shoulders jerked convulsively.
"Great Snell!" he gasped. "So that was it! I ran into a temporal snag!"
With a startled glance around, he fled to the storeroom from which he had first emerged. The overalls he took off and returned to their hook. After that, Joe went over to a corner, felt around in the air, nodded with satisfaction, and seated himself on nothing, three feet above the floor. Then Joe vanished.


"Time," said Kerry Westerfield, "is curved. Eventually it gets back to the same place where it started. That's duplication." He put his feet up on a conveniently out-jutting rock of the chimney and stretched luxuriously. From the kitchen Martha made clinking noises with bottles and glasses.
"Yesterday at this time I had a Martini," Kerry said. "The time curve indicates that I should have another one now. Are you listening, angel?"
"I'm pouring," said the angel distantly.
"You get my point, then. Here's another. Time describes a spiral instead of a circle. If you call the first cycle 'a,' the second one's 'a plus 1'Чsee? Which means a double Martini tonight."
"I know where that would end," Martha remarked, coming into the spacious, oak-raftered living room. She was a small, dark-haired woman, with a singularly pretty face and a figure to match. Her tiny gingham apron looked slightly absurd in combination with slacks and silk blouse. "And they don't make infinity-proof gin. Here's your Martini." She did things with the shaker and manipulated glasses.
"Stir slowly," Kerry cautioned. "Never shake. AhЧthat's it." He accepted the drink and eyed it appreciatively. Black hair, sprinkled with gray, gleamed in the lamplight as he sipped the Martini. "Good. Very good."
Martha drank slowly and eyed her husband. A nice guy, Kerry Westerfield. He was forty-odd, pleasantly ugly, with a wide mouth and with an occasional sardonic gleam in his gray eyes as he contemplated life. They had been married for twelve years, and liked it.
From outside, the late, faint glow of sunset came through the windows, picking out the console cabinet that stood against the wall by the door. Kerry peered at it with appreciation.
"A pretty penny," he remarked. "StillЧ" "What? Oh. The men had a tough time getting it up the stairs. Why don't you try it, Kerry?"
"Didn't you?"
"The old one was complicated enough," Martha said in a baffled manner. "Gadgets. They confuse me. I was brought up on an Edison. You wound it up with a crank, and strange noises came out of a horn. That I could understand. But nowЧyou push a button, and extraordinary things happen. Electric eyes, tone selections, records that get played on both sides, to the accompaniment of weird groanings and clickings from inside the consoleЧprobably you understand those things. I don't even want to. Whenever I play a Crosby record in a superduper like that, Bing seems embarrassed."
Kerry ate his olive. "I'm going to play some Debussy." He nodded toward a table. "There's a new Crosby record for you. The latest."
Martha wriggled happily. "Can I, maybe, huh?"
"Uh-huh."
"But you'll have to show me how."
"Simple enough," said Kerry, beaming at the console. "Those babies are pretty good, you know. They do everything but think."
"I wish they'd wash the dishes," Martha remarked. She set down her glass, got up, and vanished into the kitchen.