"Rusch-WithoutEnd" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

"No." Dylan's fingers were frozen to the side of the mug. He pulled them away.
"She was working on space-time equations, did you know that?"

Ross removed his hand from the tabletop, the odd expression -- the one Dylan had
seen at the funeral -- back on his face. "Of course I knew that. We have to
report on her research twice a term."

"She said she was close to something. That we thought about time wrong. That we
were looking for beginnings and endings, and they weren't important-- and
possibly not even probable. She said we were limited by the way we think, Ross."

"It's not a new area," Ross said. A cocktail waitress went by, her tray loaded
with heavy beer mugs. Patrons ducked and slipped into each other to stay out of
her way. "We've been exploring space-time since Einstein. Geneva was going over
very old ground. The department was going to re-examine her position if she
hadn't taken a new angie this term."

"Her angle was new." Dylan wiped his hands on his jeans. "It was new from the
beginning. She said the problem was not in the physical world, but in the way
our minds understood it. She said --"

"I know what she said." Ross's voice was gentle. "It's not physics, Dylan. It's
philosophy."

Dylan's entire body tensed. "I didn't change her, Ross. She was thinking this
way when we met, when she was an undergraduate. She said that our limitations
limited the way we looked at the universe, and she's right. You know she's
right."

"We already know about space-time," Ross said. "About the lack of beginnings and
the lack of endings. We know all that --"

"But we still think in linear terms. If we truly understood relativity, time
would be all encompassing. We would experience everything at once."

"Dylan," Ross said, his voice soft. "Linear time keeps us sane."

"No," Dylan said. "That's why ancient maps had dragons on them, and why no one
believed that the world was round. Why Galileo got imprisoned for showing the
universe didn't work the way the church wanted it to. You all got upset at her
because she was showing you that your minds were as narrow as the ancients',
that you have your theories of everything and think you can understand it all,
when you don't take into account your own beings. She is doing physics, Ross.
You're just too blind to see it."

Dylan stood up. The conversation around him had stopped, and tile short-haired,
too-young students were staring at him. Ross was looking at his hands.

Dylan waited, breathing heavily, a pressure inside his chest that he had never