"H. Beam Piper - Time and Time Again" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

On the way home, a boy, sitting on the top step of a front porch, hailed him. Allan replied cordially, trying
to remember who it was. Of course; Larry Morton! He and Allan had been buddies. They probably had
been swimming, or playing Commandos and Germans, the afternoon before. Larry had gone to Cornell
the same year that Allan had gone to Penn State; they had both graduated in 1954. Larry had gotten into
some Government bureau, and then he had married a Pittsburgh girl, and had become twelfth
vice-president of her father's firm. He had been killed, in 1968, in a plane crash.

"You gonna Sunday school?" Larry asked, mercifully unaware of the fate Allan foresaw for him.

"Why, no. I have some things I want to do at home." He'd have to watch himself. Larry would spot a
difference quicker than any adult. "Heck with it," he added.

"Golly, I wisht I c'ld stay home from Sunday school whenever I wanted to," Larry envied. "How about us
goin' swimmin', at the Canoe Club, 'safter?"

Allan thought fast. "Gee, I wisht I c'ld," he replied, lowering his grammatical sights. "I gotta stay home,
'safter. We're expectin' comp'ny; coupla aunts of mine. Dad wants me to stay home when they come."
That went over all right. Anybody knew that there was no rational accounting for the vagaries of the adult
mind, and no appeal from adult demands. The prospect of company at the Hartley home would keep
Larry away, that afternoon. He showed his disappointment.

"Aw, jeepers creepers!" he blasphemed euphemistically.

"Mebbe t'morrow," Allan said. "If I c'n make it. I gotta go, now; ain't had breakfast yet." He scuffed his
feet boyishly, exchanged so-longs with his friend, and continued homeward.




As he had hoped, the Sunday paper kept his father occupied at breakfast, to the exclusion of any
dangerous table talk. Blake Hartley was still deep in the financial section when Allan left the table and
went to the library. There should be two books there to which he wanted badly to refer. For a while, he
was afraid that his father had not acquired them prior to 1945, but he finally found them, and carried
them onto the front porch, along with a pencil and a ruled yellow scratch pad. In his experienced
futureтАФor his past-to-comeтАФAllan Hartley had been accustomed to doing his thinking with a pencil. As
reporter, as novelist plotting his work, as amateur chemist in his home laboratory, as scientific warfare
research officer, his ideas had always been clarified by making notes. He pushed a chair to the table and
built up the seat with cushions, wondering how soon he would become used to the proportional disparity
between himself and the furniture. As he opened the books and took his pencil in his hand, there was one
thing missing. If he could only smoke a pipe, now!

His father came out and stretched in a wicker chair with the Times book-review section. The morning
hours passed. Allan Hartley leafed through one book and then the other. His pencil moved rapidly at
times; at others, he doodled absently. There was no question, any more, in his mind, as to what or who
he was. He was Allan Hartley, a man of forty-three, marooned in his own thirteen-year-old body, thirty
years back in his own past. That was, of course, against all common sense, but he was easily able to
ignore that objection. It had been made before: against the astronomy of Copernicus, and the geography
of Columbus, and the biology of Darwin, and the industrial technology of Samuel Colt, and the military
doctrines of Charles de Gaulle. Today's common sense had a habit of turning into tomorrow's utter
nonsense. What he needed, right now, but bad, was a theory that would explain what had happened to