"Rudy Rucker - Master Of Space And Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

door. I took the thumb-sized Harry off my steer-
ing wheel and set him down on the dashboard.
The smaller Harrys moved right along with him.
They all stood there in a row, staring at me.

"Why all the copies, Harry?"

"I'm real, and the others are correction terms,"
said the thumb-sized man. "A convergent series of
echoes. You've been reading The Cat in the Hat
Comes Back, haven't you?"

"Yeah, I was reading it to Serena last night." I
didn't bother asking how Harry knew. "You must
be thinking about the scene where the Cat has a
smaller cat in his Hat, and the smaller cat has a yet
smaller cat in his hat, and the yet smaller cat has a
still smaller cat, and so on forever, right?"

"You're a rational man, Fletcher. Watch this!"
Each of the little Harrys squatted down by the
next smaller one. The big oneтАФthe thumb-sized
HarryтАФstuck some fingers in his mouth and at-
tempted a sharp whistle. It came out as a wet hiss.
But this was enough.

The smallest Harry I could see, a speck-sized
one, jumped into the coat pocket of the next larger
one, a flea-sized Harry. The flea-sized Harry
jumped into the coat pocket of the ant-sized Harry.
The ant-sized Harry jumped into the coat pocket
of the thumb-sized Harry. They nested themselves
together like Chinese boxes. I wondered how many
levels there were.

"You like it better now?"

"I like it better."

"Aren't you going to ask me how I got this
way?"

"I figure you'll tell meтАФif you can." A frustrat-
ing aspect of Harry's inventions was that he rarely
understood how they worked. He was like some
drunken chef who never writes down a recipe.
This idiosyncrasy of Harry's had prevented Fletcher
& Company from getting patents on any of his
inventions, and had eventually made people unwill-
ing to contract with us.