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

Before he could tell the others of his new calculation, they stood before a new discovery.
A wide stream separated them from the black wall slicing across the landscape a few hundred meters ahead.
Stream...?
The stream, tossed by the intangible storm, was frozen in the midst of its movement, but one could plainly see the direction of the wind. The stream looked as though it had been suddenly petrified. Some of the spray hung motionless like shining crystals in the air. It could take hours for the crystals to fall back into the water.
"How are we going to get over to the other side?" asked Harras, disappointed. "It's a stream alright-the materialized stream of time."
"Nonsense!" answered Rous, turning away from the problem he had so intensively thought about. "Follow me!"
He walked ahead as though there were no stream in front of him. His foot touched the frozen surface of the water-and found support. Before the other men had rightly understood what they saw with their own eyes, Rous was out in the middle of the water, walking on it. He went ahead, as though the surface were made of stone.
"It's quite safe," he called back, stopping for a moment. "It would be at least 10 minutes before the water had time to give way beneath my feet."
It was like walking over ice but completely without the slipperiness. The unmoving waves showed the direction of the wind that had shaped them, just as the bent limbs on the single trees. Judging from the trees, the storm must be quite strong. Yet the men felt nothing of it because for them even a hurricane crawled along at the rate of 1/2 millimetre per second, or less than 2 meters a minute.
And then they stood before the wall.
Rous touched it with his hands and felt a solid resistance. The wall was black but not an absolute solid black, more like a faintly shimmering crystal marble. The darkness began only a few centimetres beyond the outermost, translucent layers.
Or at least it looked that way.
The wall was smooth and did not present any seams or cracks where fingers or feet could find a grip. It reached straight up into the sky and seemed to vault over the ground like a dome. The higher it went, the more its colour faded. At the zenith it allowed a view of the reddish rays of the sun and even the clouds were visible through it.
So the LFG created a spherical time-force-field around itself. Rous was convinced that the field extended below ground as well. At the same time he began to suspect they had not yet even begun to see all of the mysterious world of the other dimension. Again the decisive question came to mind:
What lay beyond the black wall?
There was only one way to find out but that seemed too risky to Rous: the LFG would have to be turned off while they were in the alien time-dimension. Then the wall would disappear.
But at the same time the way back would be cut off.
Rous turned around involuntarily and looked back. He breathed easier as he saw the pale circle of light floating over the ground. It was pure coincidence that he noticed a twisted nearby tree that resembled a gallows.
"Well, we can't go any farther," observed Steiner quite unnecessarily. "Nobody's going to get through this." He tapped against the wall. "What kind of material can this be?"
"None at all," said Rous and Noir seemed to agree. "It's energy, nothing else."
"Energy?" asked Josua, interested. He was the metallurgist of the expedition and the unknown wall thus fell into his area of specialization. "A solid wall of energy? I've never run across anything like that."
"Now you have," Noir told him. "Think of our ships' defence fields. Throw an object at them and it certainly won't go through."
The Afroterranian shook his head almost desperately. "But that's the difference, Noir! Our energy screens turn any matter that touches them into energy. But you can touch this wall. It doesn't feel either warm or cold, it doesn't give off deadly bolts of energy and so far it hasn't converted me into energy."
"You can also touch the neutralized energy dome over Terrania without being destroyed and yet it won't let any matter through," said Steiner after some thought, blasting Josua's argument to nothing. "It can he the same way with this black wall. It's energy produced by our machinery in the Gazelle and so governed by our natural laws. I think that last condition will be the key to a solution if anyone ever wonders how we can remove this barrier sometime."
"Consider the problem solved," Rous told him a bit gleefully. "But I wouldn't want to walk around this unreal world with the return to our dimension blocked. Only if someone would be stationed in front of the LFG with orders to turn it back on at a certain time."
"I think we've found a way now to one day penetrate the aliens' world," Noir commented matterнofнfactly, stroking the wall thoughtfully with his hand. "Perhaps we would see things a little differently and a little better if we assumed that this barrier really protects us from any dangers that might be lying in wait for us on the other side."
No one answered, which meant in this case that everyone agreed with him.
They went another 2 or 300 meters along the wall, then crossed back over the river, heading towards the shimmering ring waiting for them more than 1000 meters away.
Ragov suddenly let loose a curse and put his hand to his face. Then he took a step backwards and stared at the tiny object floating motionless in the air just in front of his nose. He had simply walked into it noticing it.
"An insect!" he murmured in disbelief, shaking his head. "I just had a head-on collision with a fly-and it didn't move an inch!"
The others collected around the object of collision. It was indeed a sort of fly. It had long feelers, colourfully shining wings, 8 delicate legs, and glistening large eyes
Rous suddenly had the feeling he had spotted a slight motion in this world of absolute immobility.
The insect...?
But that was hardly possible even if the little creature flew along at 100 kilometres an hour. At that rate it would move at a relative speed of I centimetre every 20 seconds and movement that slight would be difficult to perceive with the unaided eye in free space.
But something else connected with the insect did move.
The wings!
Now the others saw it too. Very slowly and barely noticeable, to be sure, but without a doubt the iridescent wings were rising. The motion lasted 10 seconds, then they sank down again, only to begin the movement once more half a minute later.
"1 wing-beat per minute!" Harras exclaimed and made some lightning calculations. "Good heavens! This little bug's beating its wings a thousand times a second, alien dimension time. Unbelievable!"
"There are insects on Earth who beat their wings even faster," Ragov said quietly, watching as the wings reached their highest point and then began to descend. In the last 2 or 3 minutes the insect had moved several centimetres ahead. It was relatively swift and actually moved at a speed of some 30 meters a second.
"If someone shoots at us here," muttered Steiner with a happy tone, "we could easily step out of the bullet's way."
He calculated half out loud and gave the result beaming with joy. "Yeah, a bullet of the usual type would cover about a meter a minute. It's unbelievable to think about it. We're in a world of slow motion."
"But," said Rous with a serious edge in his voice, "don't get the idea that you would not be hurt if such a crawl-speed bullet hit you. If you stood still, it would bore into your flesh slowly but surely and kill you."
"Lovely prospect." The physicist shuddered and went back to staring at the glittering insect, which continued undisturbed its slow flight. "I wonder... could you kill it?"
Rous raised his eyebrows. "Why do you want to kill it? It hasn't done anything to us..."
"It was only a question," said Steiner. "I only wanted to know if it was possible to kill a living creature of this dimension-I didn't say I actually wanted to do it."
"Well, I would think it's possible," Rous admitted reluctantly, "but I hope it won't be necessary for us to find out. In our current situation, we are exactly 72,000 times more advanced than the inhabitants of this dimension."
"So our mission is as good as carried out," Harras broke in triumphantly. "Other than finding a way to defeat our enemies, we have nothing more to do."
Rous nodded, but without any enthusiasm. "Your quite right, Harras, only we haven't even encountered one of those enemies yet. We don't know what our enemy looks like, who he is and what he's planning. Looking at it that way, our mission is a long way from being completed. It hasn't even begun."
They went on and accelerated their pace. Josua, who took up the rear and followed a few paces behind, suddenly spoke. "What's that rustling noise? It's coming from somewhere up ahead."
While the others continued, Rous stopped. "Rustling? I don't hear any rustling noise."