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

Beat around the bush and try to build a background, or come out with it at once and fill in the details
afterward? He debated mentally for a moment, then decided upon the latter course.

"Well, it happens that I have the ability to prehend future events. I can, by concentrating, bring into my
mind the history of the world, at least in general outline, for the next five thousand years. Whitburn thinks
I'm crazy, mainly because I get confused at times and forget that something I know about hasn't
happened yet."

Weill snatched the cigarette from his mouth to keep from swallowing it. As it was, he choked on a
mouthful of smoke and coughed violently, then sat back in the booth-seat, staring speechlessly.

"It started a little over three years ago," Chalmers continued. "Just after New Year's, 1970. I was getting
up a series of seminars for some of my postgraduate students on extrapolation of present social and
political trends to the middle of the next century, and I began to find that I was getting some very fixed
and definite ideas of what the world of 2050 to 2070 would be like. Completely unified world, abolition
of all national states under a single world sovereignty, colonies on Mars and Venus, that sort of thing.
Some of these ideas didn't seem quite logical; a number of them were complete reversals of present
trends, and a lot seemed to depend on arbitrary and unpredictable factors. Mind, this was before the first
rocket landed on the Moon, when the whole moon-rocket and lunar-base project was a triple-top
secret. But I knew, in the spring of 1970, that the first unmanned rocket would be called the Kilroy, and
that it would be launched some time in 1971. You remember, when the news was released, it was stated
that the rocket hadn't been christened until the day before it was launched, when somebody remembered
that old 'Kilroy-was-here' thing from the Second World War. Well, I knew about it over a year in
advance."

Weill had been listening in silence. He had a naturally skeptical face; his present expression mightn't really
mean that he didn't believe what he was hearing.

"How'd you get all this stuff? In dreams?"

Chalmers shook his head. "It just came to me. I'd be sitting reading, or eating dinner, or talking to one of
my classes, and the first thing I'd know, something out of the future would come bubbling up in me. It just
kept pushing up into my conscious mind. I wouldn't have an idea of something one minute, and the next it
would just be part of my general historical knowledge; I'd know it as positively as I know that Columbus
discovered America in. 1492. The only difference is that I can usually remember where I've read
something in past history, but my future history I know without knowing how I know it."

"Ah, that's the question!" Weill pounced. "You don't know how you know it. Look, Ed, we've both
studied psychology, elementary psychology at least. Anybody who has to work with people, these days,
has to know some psychology. What makes you sure that these prophetic impressions of yours aren't
manufactured in your own subconscious mind?"

"That's what I thought, at first. I thought my subconscious was just building up this stuff to fill the gaps in
what I'd produced from logical extrapolation. I've always been a stickler for detail," he added,
parenthetically. "It would be natural for me to supply details for the future. But, as I said, a lot of this stuff
is based on unpredictable and arbitrary factors that can't be inferred from anything in the present. That
left me with the alternatives of delusion or precognition, and if I ever came near going crazy, it was before
the Kilroy landed and the news was released. After that, I knew which it was."

"And yet, you can't explain how you can have real knowledge of a thing before it happens. Before it