"Paul Preuss - Rhea's Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preuss Paul)

Another extraordinary conversation with Rhea. After the lightest brush of suggestion she talked readily;
yet when I left she was as deep in trance as ever. Questioning her, I became entranced myself; so
relentless was the flow of dates that, almost, I was the one hypnotized.

So precise were her descriptions that I sent myself back to the library and dug up stacks of illustrated
articles, some technical, some popularтАФGod knows there is no shortage of themтАФwhich picture the
wanderings of the continents for the past 200 million years or more. It seems we live near the end of only
the most recent spreading of the seafloors, which have expanded and recontracted many times before;
the Earth might be taken for a thing that breathes. In the course of her career Rhea has mastered these
coordinates and timetables, which to the uninitiated seem so many unrelated numbers, and she now
regurgitates them obsessively.

DECEMBER 20, MIDDAY.
ItтАЩs time to have a talk with RheaтАЩs husband (IтАЩll call him Arthur), and since my rooms are in one of the
new colleges, a short walk from Science Hill, I decide to beard him in his den.

I am told that the universityтАЩs accelerator laboratory is small as such places go, but it has a certain
futuristic dignity all its own. Outside, itтАЩs a blocklong Neolithic burial mound, geometrically precise,
carpeted with clipped green grass; inside, itтАЩs a concrete vault, which houses a stainless steel machine as
big as a U-boat.

They find Arthur for me and take me to him, down on the floor beside a nest of metal boxes garlanded
with black rubberized cables, rooting like a scavenger in a basket of computer printout. HeтАЩs a compact
fellow, mid-forties, his face almost completely obscured by a brushy blond beard, with bristling blond
brows and stiff blond hair going to gray. When he finally looks up, dark brown eyes stare out of the
thicket through rimless plus-three diopters, giving him the look of a pugnacious sea otter.

I ask him about the ski accident and the New YearтАЩs Eve party. He adds a few details to the
recordтАФtalking a mile a minute in the pained manner of someone explaining the obvious to an idiot. They
took their holidays in the mountains near GenevaтАФthe Juras, not the Alps, the Alpine resorts being too
expensive and crowdedтАФbecause he was working for six months at the big European physics laboratory
near there. The New YearтАЩs party was at the apartment of ArthurтАЩs team leader, a Professor Kertesz.
When Rhea complained of a blinding headache, nobody did anything at first because they thought sheтАЩd
simply drunk too much. The ambulance was an hour late because of the holiday mob.

I want to know something about Arthur personally, about his work. He blinks rapidly and tells me heтАЩs a
theorist; apparently this means his interest in machines is confined to the graphs they excrete. The one
nearby is a sort of electromagnetic cannon that pushes the nuclei of large atoms to some significant
fraction of the speed of light, thus allowing him to study their interactions.

Mm, I nod sagely. Interactions.

Like these, he says, and shows me a graph which could well be a pen and ink sketch of the Dolomites.
He mumbles about the contraction of thet coordinate and shows me another, even more jagged.

The contraction of what?

тАЬPicture a Minkowski diagram in which . . .тАЭ

тАФbut he sees that I fail the Snow test and could not distinguish the second law of thermodynamics from