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

picture was as perfect as my memory was excellent. For that brief spell I was twelve years
back in all but the flesh.
"I call this thing a psychophone," Burman went on. "When you imagine what the future will be
like, you make a charac┬мteristic choice of all the logical possibilities, you pick your fa┬мvorite
from a multitude of likely futures. The psychophone, somehowтАФthe Lord alone knows
howтАФtunes you into future reality. It makes you depict within your mind the future as it will be
shaped in actuality, eliminating all the alternatives that will not occur."
"An imagination-stimulator, a dream-machine," I scoffed, not feeling as sure of myself as I
sounded. "How do you know it's giving you the McCoy?"
"Consistency," he answered, gravely. "It repeats the same features and the same trends far
too often for the phenomena to be explained as mere coincidence. Besides," he waved a
persuasive hand, "I got the battery from the future. It works, doesn't it?"
"It does," I agreed, reluctantly. I pointed to his psy┬мchophone. "I, too, may travel in time. How
about letting me have a try? Maybe I'll solve your mystery for you."
"You can try if you wish," he replied, quite willingly. He pulled a chair into position. "Sit here,
and I'll let you peer into the future."

Clipping the headband over my cranium, and fitting the copper rings against my skull where
it sprouted ears, Burman connected his psychophone to the mains, switched it on; or rather
he did some twiddling that I assumed was a mode of switching on.
"All you have to do," he said, "is close your eyes, compose yourself, then try and permit your
imagination to wander into the future."
He meddled with the cat's whisker. A couple of times he said, "Ah!" And each time he said
it I got a peculiar dithery feeling around my unfortunate ears. After a few seconds of this, he
drew it out to, "A-a-ah!" I played unfair, and peeped beneath lowered lids. The crystal was
glowing like rats' eyes in a forgotten cellar. A furtive crimson.
Closing my own optics, I let my mind wander. Something was flowing between those copper
electrodes, a queer, indescribable something that felt with stealthy fingers at some secret
portion of my brain. I got the asinine notion that they were the dexterous digits of a
yet-to-be-born magician who was going to shout, "Presto!" and pull my abused lump of
think-meat out of a thirtieth-century hatтАФassuming they'd wear hats in the thirtieth century.
What was it like, or, rather, what would it be like in the thirtieth century? Would there be
retrogression? Would hu┬мmanity again be composed of scowling, fur-kilted creatures
lurking in caves? Or had progress continuedтАФperhaps even to the development of men like
gods?
Then it happened! I swear it! I pictured, quite voluntarily, a savage, and then a huge-domed
individual with glittering eyesтАФthe latter being my version of the ugliness we hope to attain.
Right in the middle of this erratic dreaming, those weird fingers warped my brain, dissolved
my phantoms, and replaced them with a dictated picture which I witnessed with all the
helplessness and clarity of a nightmare.
I saw a fat man spouting. He was quite an ordinary man as far as looks went. In fact, he was
so normal that he looked henpecked. But he was attired in a Roman toga, and he wore a
small, black box where his laurel wreath ought to have been. His audience was similarly
dressed, and all were bal┬мancing their boxes like a convention of fish porters. What Fatty
was orating sounded gabble to me, but he said his piece as if he meant it.
The crowd was in the open air, with great, curved rows of seats visible in the background.
Presumably an outside audi┬мtorium of some sort. Judging by the distance of the back rows,
it must have been a devil of a size. Far behind its sweeping ridge a great edifice jutted into
the sky, a cubical erection with walls of glossy squares, like an immense glass-house.
"F'wot?" bellowed Fatty, with obvious heat. "Wuk, wuk, wuk, mor, noon'n'ni'! Bok onned, ord