"Perry Rhodan 064 - Prisoner of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Rhodan)

Rous gave the caterpillars one last look and listened to the weird clang of the cries which drove so slowly into his ears. 'We'll come back to take another look at the Druufs but now we'll..."
"The what?" exclaimed Steiner in surprise.
"I called them 'Druufs' because that's what their cries sounded like," Rous explained. "And now we're off to go see about that odd ship which seems to be landing in the area of our light-ring."
Partly relieved and partly discontent, the members of the time expedition took up the march once more.
Even if they had decided to crawl, they could still overtake the future any time...






4/ PHANTOMS OF REALITY

The ship was more than 1,000 meters long and orbited the planet at a great distance. Its interior consisted of an infinity of complicated control devices, automatically functioning alarm installations and chambers filled with positronic instruments. Vague and indefinite figures moved indistinctly through the gloom: they represented the only fife aboard the giant ship.
The ship watched over the planet below, which stood on the edge of the time plane and more than once had penetrated the alien dimension and returned. Each time it had been laden with alien organisms and from overtaking them the scientists promised a fusion of the 2 time planes.
And so yet another world had been depopulated without its denizens being able to do anything about it one way or the other.
When the planet returned, it had obtained a new population whose temporal inertia had more or less adjusted its rate of time to that of the new dimension.
For the aliens it had been a bitter lesson: by the first meeting they had recognized the fact that their own dimension was not the relatively normal and real one, but the one theirs was cutting across. They had to adjust to it if they did not want to live from now on like exiles. What could be lonelier than being an exile of time?
Videoscreens lit up and indicators flew over illuminated dials. Somewhere deep inside the ship reactors hummed. The robot surveillance over the planet was in operation.
The aliens were naturally well aware of their relationship to the other universe. All organic beings on the other time plane lived 72,000 times more quickly than they and only with the help of complicated apparatus and instruments could they be made visible. It was all reminiscent of a technology of unimaginable slow-motion photography. The films had to race through the cameras at high speed and then be run in the projectors at a vastly slower pace for even fleeting shadows to show on the screens.
But when one of their worlds penetrated the other plane, the organisms brought back with it had adapted to the new rate of time. Perhaps it would be possible to aim at merging the 2 dimensions...
Figures sped here and there; they could not be made out.
The screens looked identical but each was different. The first screen on the left stood relatively empty. On it distant mountains could be seen across a wide plane, separated from the viewer by valleys and rivers in between. The sky was clouded over and it was about to rain at any second. A storm was brewing along the horizon and the first lightning raced out of the sky towards the ground.
The 2nd screen showed precisely the same picture but the speed of events had been slowed down. The caterpillar-like creatures still moved with some degree of speed but the water in the streams already seemed to be flowing more slowly. The overall view was the same as that on the first screen: it showed the plane, the mountains and the rivers.
Only on the 3rd screen was the slow motion beginning to appear with any obviousness. The fascinating aspect about it was the certainty that the view on the screen was not merely slow motion due to photographic tricks but a living slow motion.
The 4th screen depicted events slowed by more than half.
On the 5th screen the lightning crawled towards the ground and the rain fell as though each drop hung at the end of an invisible thread someone only hesitantly reeled out. The caterpillars now barely moved; they seemed to have become the laziest creatures in the universe.
The first shadows flitted across the curved surface of the 6th screen. Since movement had been slowed by 60,000 on this screen and the figures were recognizable only as shadows, one could well imagine how fast these phantoms were in reality.
By the 10th screen the shadows moved normally and could be made out. But the motion had been so slowed down that all normal life seemed to be petrified. The storm and the lightning seemed like a painting. The rain hung glued in the air and the rivers looked as though frozen. Only the shadows of the beings from another dimension moved normally, as though unaffected by what was around them.
Indefinable faces bent over the 10th screen.

* * * *

At that moment Rous had the feeling of being watched.
He found it impossible to explain the sensation: he simply felt it and had to accept it at that. It was sheer nonsense, of course, since there was no one in sight who could observe him.
Ragov did not laugh when Rous spoke of his feeling.
"Why couldn't we be observed?" the biologist asked. "Doesn't the coming landing of the ship bear witness to that? But we still don't know if it even intends to land. Perhaps..."
"Perhaps...?"
"Perhaps it's remote-controlled and was sent-to observe us! That could be it! We don't know anything about the intelligences of this time plane but that doesn't mean we should underestimate them. In any case, I'm not comfortable thinking about the Druufs. There's more to them than they're willing to let show."
They walked across the plane and crossed the river that had once flowed just inside the black wall. They recognized the gallows tree in the distance and in front of it a familiar figure-Josua.
And the ship floated just 100 meters overhead.
Rous switched on his ring-transmitter. "What is it, Josua? Isn't the ship going to land?"
"It's stopped," the voice of the African replied. "It isn't sinking any farther. It isn't going to land at all. I wonder if it's seen us?"
"Impossible!" We're moving much too fast." Rous had an uncertain feeling as he said it. He was suddenly not so convinced that the Druufs could not see them. If they had any knowledge of technology at all-and that had to be the case since they built spaceships-then they could have succeeded also in breaking through the time barrier.
The other Terrans required 5 minutes to reach Josua. Above them floated the motionless ship.
Rous found his suspicions confirmed. "An observation station," he said, pointing upwards. "Do you see the different cameras pointed at us? I bet it's a relay station of some sort. They're photographing us with television cameras and then transmitting the picture somewhere else-although where that is I don't know either. Perhaps to one of their cities or to another ship."
"You don't think anyone's aboard?" asked Steiner. "A robot-guided ship, maybe?"
"I can't be certain," said Rous, "but I am convinced that this little ship is nothing more than an auxiliary vessel for some larger ship. The aliens don't want to expose themselves to any danger so they send a portable TV camera. We wouldn't do it much differently if we were in their shoes."
Steiner's eyes narrowed. "Answer 2 questions for me, Lieutenant, and I won't say another thing."
"Ask away!"