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

Steiner was the first into the Gazelle and switched on the hypercom transmitter as agreed. Headquarters in Terrania had to be notified of events before the actual experiment began. Rous was also in the control room a second later, activating the energy of the Arkonide reactor within the Lens Field Generator.
Josua, last aboard the Gazelle, shut the hatch behind him with a hollow clang. The air conditioning came on automatically.
Steiner was receiving a reply from the station on Terra. Without paying any attention to the activity around him, he sent off the prepared message:

Gazelle Lt. Rous to HQ Terrania! Attack in progress. We are in Zone A. Overlapping zone runs asymmetrically; statistic levels. Overlapping has now reached 99%. We are trying to gain view of other plane with lens generator. Will report as soon as possible. End.

Rous waited until the generator was running and was beginning to form the time window. A shimmering circle of light suddenly materialized in the middle of the control room, about a meter in diameter. Josua stared at it as though it were an incomprehensible miracle, although he knew full well what it was. But Rous had to admit that he was not very comfortable himself. The luminosity of the Window showed that the time front had just rolled over them in that second.
Steiner turned off the hypercom transmitter and stepped over to Rous. "It's time," he said in a businesslike tone, despite a barely noticeable trembling in his voice. "What are we waiting for now?"
Ivan Ragov, standing a bit to one side, suddenly cried out in terror. "My arm! Those damned Unseen have grabbed me!"
It was Noir who acted. "Quick, Steiner! Ragov's got to go through the Window first! Help me!"
Rous raised his hand. "Have you gone crazy?"
"If we don't want to lose our Normal Time, we've got to try it, Lieutenant!" Noir yelled at him without respect for rank. "Should we fall into the other dimension and lose our Normal Time? Then we'd never get back!"
Rous understood what Noir meant.
But Ragov understood even more quickly.
He leaped forward, crying from pain while his lost arm became visible again, and sprang into the middle of the glowing circle of the time window.
At the same time, he disappeared completely.
Rous felt himself grasped and shoved through the ring of fire. His eyes noticed the change even as his head crossed the boundary into the other dimension. Not that it was lighter or darker... no, not at all. The light stayed the same. But the landscape had changed. It was as though passage through the time window had been a teleportation leap at the same time and he had landed on another world. Or was it Tats-Tor in a different time?
He saw Ragov, who had come to rest 2 or 3 meters away, having not landed on his feet. The Russian was just then standing up, looking around in surprise and not quite understanding everything yet. But-what had they really expected?
Rous suddenly felt a push from nowhere and lost his balance. Luckily, he did not fall and managed to regain his footing. He turned and saw Harras floating 3 meters above the ground and encircled by a faintly glowing ring.
"Jump!" Rous cried.
Harras jumped and landed next to Rous. "Good heavens-where are we?"
Rous waited until all the men had collected beside him and only the weakly shining ring showed the way back into their own time plane. Once it was lost to view, there could be no return.
"We're on the world of the Unseen, Harras," Rous said. "Nothing moves besides us here, not even the wind, because everything exists at a rate 72000 times more slowly than us. We are invisible to any inhabitants of this world because we move too fast."
"Where are the inhabitants?" asked Josua fearfully, staying close to Steiner.
"We'll find them," Rous promised vaguely and, pointed in the direction of a nearby hill. "Look at the Arkonide police troop, Noir. They've lost their Normal Time and exist now in an alien time. Don't those men look like lumps of stone?"
They looked around and were silent although they all were burning with questions. They assumed somehow that Rous would answer them all, for he had once been in the other time plane for awhile.
The horizon was cut off by a darkly shining wall reaching high into the sky. It marked the limits of the LFG's effective radius. The men could not penetrate beyond the black wall and what lay behind would remain a mystery.
They stood on a fertile plain which was broken by valleys and hills. Streams and brooks rolled on through the valleys towards an unknown destination beyond the black wall. Starkly motionless stood the trees in front of the men, unmoved by even a breath of wind. It was relatively warm and humid. Some clouds in the sky indicated that rain would not be long in coming.
An odd flickering in the air led Harras to a question. "It isn't really so warm that the heated air should be rising. And anyway-if your theory's correct, Lieutenant-any movement of the air would be so slow that we wouldn't notice it. Do you have an explanation?"
Rous looked toward the horizon and also noticed the flickering. He narrowed his eyes and nodded slowly. "Yes, I have an explanation. You will also have an explanation for all the phenomena you encounter if you never forget that everything here lives and exists more slowly. The flickering you see, Harras, comes from air molecules breaking up the light."
Steiner moaned lightly and took his eyes away from the astounding view. Then his glance fell upon a transparent and shining crystal about the size of a pea, hanging motionless in the air. All but frightened, the physicist pointed at it and stammered in bewilderment: "The explanation, Rous? Here's a crystal object floating weightless in the air. Does gravity also have something to do with the retardation of time?"
Rous looked at the crystal and smiled in relief. "Mr. Steiner, I already said, that there would be an explanation for everything. That includes this crystal, which is nothing other than a very slowly falling raindrop. Consider that this raindrop falls 72,000 times more slowly than on Earth, assuming this world has the same gravitation, which seems to be the case. What does that mean? The raindrop falls about 10 centimetres an hour, based on the usual speed of falling back on Terra."
They stared at the wonder of the floating crystal, which seemed to defy all understanding. Steiner was evidently not completely convinced. He reached out to the raindrop with his hand and tried to grasp it. But he did not succeed. The crystal hung in the air as though nailed there and could not be moved a millimetre. The inertia of its mass had increased parallel to the retardation of time. One required 72,000 times more energy to catch a raindrop here than on the Earth. Not even Steiner had that much strength.
"You can't grasp it!" he decided and gave up. "At least we won't get wet here."
Rous turned, looking for the ring of light. He breathed easier when he saw it. "I think we'll take a little walk over to the black wall. Maybe we can find out what's on the other side. Careful, Ragov, don't trip over our police officer."
The Russian stopped and looked at the Arkonide with an indefinable expression. The officer stood unmoving and apparently lifeless before him. His eyes were half opened and it was impossible to tell if they were opening or shutting. In any event, it could be another 8 to 10 hours before he had completed the motion. Roughly speaking, a single second was about 20 hours.
Ragov touched the tip of his index finger to the Arkonide's cheek. It felt like stone and was just as cold. Half an hour would go by before the warmth of the living body penetrated to Ragov's nerves.
The staring face showed neither fear nor pain. There had not been enough time. With a sinking feeling Ragov suddenly realized that the Arkonide might realize what had happened to him only in another 50 hours. At the moment, however, he stood ripped out of his own world, a thousandth of a second incarnate.
"He can't see us," said Rous nodding to Ragov. "We're too fast for him. If he wanted to see us in his new world, he would have to film us with a camera that takes more than a million pictures a second. We are considerably faster for him than a bullet."
"What if we want to see how he moves?" asked Harras.
After considering for a few seconds, Rous went on. "Very simple, Harras. We'd have to photograph this monument with a time-lapse camera-16 exposures in 20 hours. When the film is played at normal speed, 16 frames a second, then we'd see the Arkonide as he really is."
Steiner pointed to the officer's half-opened mouth. "Is it the same for acoustic effects?"
"Of course!" Rous understood immediately what the physicist was getting at. "The sound waves have also been slowed down relative to us. Assuming that the same natural laws are in effect here as on Earth, then sound moves at a speed of about 17 meters an hour. Not the sound waves we produce-those are governed by different laws. The speed of sound is 5 millimetres for us in this dimension, then. Perhaps now you understand just how fast we're moving."
"Are we breaking the sound barrier?" said Harras, always the practical sort. His face contorted into a questioning grimace as he started to move and felt the gentle, flowing resistance of the air, which seemed to move to the side only reluctantly.
They gradually approached the black wall. The wall closed off a circular area about 232 kilometres in diameter. In the exact centre the time window shone faintly yet clearly.
Rous found time to look up into the sky. The cloud formation had not changed in the slightest and days would go by before the already falling raindrops reached the surface of this uncanny planet. Earthly days, of course. How long a local day would last in this timelessness defied calculation. If the world revolved once on its axis in 24 Terran hours, then the sun would stand in the sky for about 100 years. A century would pass before the sun would rise from the east and cross the sky to sink in the west.
A day would last for 200 years!
Rous' brain reeled as he thought about it. No wonder an eye blink would take 20 hours to perform.
The sky was coloured a light reddish with a pale greenish undertone. The sun was hidden behind the clouds and under the circumstances could take years to reappear.
Rous suddenly understood.