"Eric Frank Russell - Mechanical Mice2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

do anything with a box that buzzes whenever it feels temperamental. Firm treatment was
required, I decided.
"You've been all nice and mysterious about how you got hold of this brain wave," I said.
"Why can't you go to the same source for information about what it's supposed to be?"
"I'll tell youтАФor, rather, I'll show you."
From his safe, Burman dragged out a box, and from the box he produced a gadget. This
one was far simpler than the useless mass of works over by the wall. It looked just like one of
those old-fashioned crystal sets, except that the crystal was very big, very shiny, and was set
in a horizontal vacuum tube. There was the same single dial, the same cat's whisker.
Attached to the lot by a length of flex was what might have been a pair of headphones,
except in place of the phones were a pair of polished, smoothly rounded copper circles
shaped to fit outside the ears and close against the skull.
"My one and only invention." said Burman, not without a justifiable touch of pride.
"What is it?"
"A time-traveling device."
"Ha, ha!" My laugh was very sour. I'd read about such things. In fact, I'd written about them.
They were bunkum. Nobody could travel through time, either backward or forward. "Let me
see you grow hazy and vanish into the fu┬мture."
"I'll show you something very soon." Burman said it with assurance I didn't like. He said it
with the positive air of a man who knows darned well that he can do something that
everybody else knows darned well can't be done. He pointed to the crystal set. "It wasn't
discovered at the first attempt. Thousands must have tried and failed. I was the lucky one. I
must have picked a peculiarly individualistic crystal; I still don't know how it does what it
does; I've never been able to repeat its performance even with a crystal apparently
identical."
"And it enables you to travel in time?"
"Only forward. It won't take me backward, not even as much as one day. But it can carry me
forward an immense distance, perhaps to the very crack of doom, perhaps everlastingly
through infinity."
I had him now! I'd got him firmly entangled in his own ab┬мsurdities. My loud chuckle was
something I couldn't control.
"You can travel forward, but not backward, not even one day back. Then how the devil can
you return to the present once you've gone into the future?"
"Because I never leave the present," he replied, evenly. "I don't partake of the future. I merely
survey it from the vantage point of the present. All the same, it is time-traveling in the correct
sense of the term." He seated himself. "Look here, Bill, what are you?"
"Who, me?"
"Yes, what are you." He went on to provide the answer. "Your name is Bill. You're a body and
a mind. Which of them is Bill?"
"Both," I said, positively.
"TrueтАФbut they're different parts of you. They're not the same even though they go around
like Siamese twins." His voice grew serious. "Your body moves always in the present, the
dividing line between the past and the future. But your mind is more free. It can think, and is
in the present. It can remember, and at once is in the past. It can imagine, and at once is in
the future, in its own choice of all the possible fu┬мtures. Your mind can travel through time!"
He'd outwitted me. I could find points to pick upon and argue about, but I knew that
fundamentally he was right. I'd not looked at it from this angle before, but he was correct in
saying that anyone could travel through time within the limits of his own memory and
imagination. At that very moment I could go back twelve years and see him in my mind's
eyes as a younger man, paler, thinner, more excitable, not so cool and self-possessed. The