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

this, ord that." He stuck an indignant finger against the mysterious object on his cranium.
"Bok onned, wuk, wuk, wuk. F'wot?" he glared around. "F'nix!" The crowd murmured
approval somewhat timidly. But it was enough for Fatty. Making up his mind, he flourished a
plump fist and shouted, "Th'ell wit'm!" Then he tore his box from his pate.
Nobody said anything, nobody moved. Dumb and wide-eyed, the crowd just stood and
stared as if paralyzed by the sight of a human being sans box. Something with a long,
slender streamlined body and broad wings soared gracefully upward in the distance,
swooped over the auditorium, but still the crowd neither moved nor uttered a sound.
A smile of triumph upon his broad face, Fatty bawled, "Lem see'm make wuk now! Lem
see'mтАФ"
He got no further. With a rush of mistiness from its tail, but in perfect silence, the soaring
thing hovered and sent down a spear of faint, silvery light. The light touched Fatty. He rotted
where he stood, like a victim of ultra-rapid leprosy. He rotted, collapsed, crumbled within his
sagging clothes, became dust as once he had been dust. It was horrible.
The watchers did not flee in utter panic; not one expression of fear, hatred or disgust came
from their tightly closed lips. In perfect silence they stood there, staring, just staring, like a
horde of wooden soldiers. The thing in the sky circled to sur┬мvey its handiwork, then dived
low over the mob, a stubby an┬мtenna in its prow sparking furiously. As one man, the crowd
turned left. As one man it commenced to march, left, right, left, right.

Tearing off the headband, I told Burman what I'd seen, or what his contraption had
persuaded me to think that I'd seen. "What the deuce did it mean?"
"Automatons," he murmured. "Glasshouses and reaction ships." He thumbed through a big
diary filled with notations in his own hands. "Ah, yes, looks like you were very early in the
thirtieth century. Unrest was persistent for twenty years prior to the Antibox Rebellion."
"What rebellion?"
"The AntiboxтАФthe revolt of the automatons against the thirty-first century Technocrats.
Jackson-Dkj-99717, a suc┬мcessful and cunning schemer with a warped box, secretly
warped hundreds of other boxes, and eventually led the rebels to victory in 3047. His
great-grandson, a greedy, thick-headed individual, caused the rebellion of the Boxless
Freemen against his own clique of Jacksocrats."
I gaped at this recital, then said, "The way you tell it makes it sound like history."
"Of course it's history," he asserted. "History that is yet to be." He was pensive for a while.
"Studying the future will seem a weird process to you, but it appears quite a normal
procedure to me. I've done it for years, and maybe familiar┬мity has bred contempt. Trouble
is though, that selectivity is poor. You can pick on some especial period twenty times in
succession, but you'll never find yourself in the same month, or even the same year. In fact,
you're fortunate if you strike twice in the same decade. Result is that my data is very erratic."
"I can imagine that," I told him. "A good guesser can guess the correct time to within a
minute or two, but never to within ten or even fifty seconds."
"Quite!" he responded. "So the hell of it has been that mine was the privilege of watching the
panorama of the fu┬мture, but in a manner so sketchy that I could not grasp its prizes. Once I
was lucky enough to watch a twenty-fifth cen┬мtury power pack assembled from first to last. I
got every detail before I lost the scene which I've never managed to hit upon again. But I
made that power packтАФand you know the result."
"So that's how you concocted your famous battery!"
"It is! But mine, good as it may be, isn't as good as the one I saw. Some slight factor is
missing." His voice was suddenly tight when he added, "I missed something because I had
to miss it!"
"Why?" I asked, completely puzzled.