"H. Beam Piper - The Edge of the Knife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

The next morning, he searched his desk and book-case in the office at school. He had never kept a
diary; now he was wishing that he had. That might have contained something that would be evidence, one
way or the other. All day, he vacillated between conviction of the reality of his future knowledge and
resolution to have no more to do with it. Once he decided to destroy all the notes he had made, and
thought of making a special study of some facet of history, and writing another book, to occupy his mind.

After lunch, he found that more data on the period immediately before the Thirty Days' War was coming
into his consciousness. He resolutely suppressed it, knowing as he did that it might never come to him
again. That evening, too, he cooked dinner for himself at his apartment, and laid out his class-work for
the next day. He'd better not stay in, that evening; too much temptation to settle himself by the
living-room fire with his pipe and his notepad and indulge in the vice he had determined to renounce.
After a little debate, he decided upon a movie; he put on again the suit he had taken off on coming home,
and went out.
The picture, a random choice among the three shows in the neighborhood, was about Seventeenth
Century buccaneers; exciting action and a sound-track loud with shots and cutlass-clashing. He let
himself be drawn into it completely, and, until it was finished, he was able to forget both the college and
the history of the future. But, as he walked home, he was struck by the parallel between the buccaneers
of the West Indies and the space-pirates in the days of the dissolution of the First Galactic Empire, in the
Tenth Century of the Interstellar Era. He hadn't been too clear on that period, and he found new data
rising in his mind; he hurried his steps, almost running upstairs to his room. It was long after midnight
before he had finished the notes he had begun on his return home.

Well, that had been a mistake, but he wouldn't make it again. He determined again to destroy his notes,
and began casting about for a subject which would occupy his mind to the exclusion of the future. Not
the Spanish Conquistadores; that was too much like the early period of interstellar expansion. He thought
for a time of the Sepoy Mutiny, and then rejected itтАФhe could "remember" something much like that on
one of the planets of the Beta Hydrae system, in the Fourth Century of the Atomic Era. There were so
few things, in the history of the past, which did not have their counter-parts in the future. That evening,
too, he stayed at home, preparing for his various classes for the rest of the week and making copious
notes on what he would talk about to each. He needed more whiskey to get to sleep that night.

Whitburn gave him no more trouble, and if any of the trustees or influential alumni made any protest about
what had happened in Modern History IV, he heard nothing about it. He managed to conduct his classes
without further incidents, and spent his evenings trying, not always successfully, to avoid drifting into
"memories" of the future....




He came into his office that morning tired and unrefreshed by the few hours' sleep he had gotten the night
before, edgy from the strain, of trying to adjust his mind to the world of Blanley College in mid-April of
1973. Pottgeiter hadn't arrived yet, but Marjorie Fenner was waiting for him; a newspaper in her hand,
almost bursting with excitement.

"Here; have you seen it, Doctor Chalmers?" she asked as he entered.

He shook his head. He ought to read the papers more, to keep track of the advancing knife-edge that
divided what he might talk about from what he wasn't supposed to know, but each morning he seemed to
have less and less time to get ready for work.