"William Tenn - Brooklyn Project" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

property alone? Sending an adequate mass of chronar into the past while it is adjacent to a hostile nation
would force that nation into the futureтАФall of it simultaneouslyтАФa future from which it would return
populated only with corpses!"
He glanced down, placed his hands behind his back and teetered on his heels. "That is why you see
two spheres on the floor. Only one of them, the ball on the right, is equipped with chronar. The other is a
dummy, matching the other's mass perfectly and serving as a counterbalance. When the chronar is
excited, it will plunge four billion years into our past and take photographs of an Earth that was still a
half-liq-uid, partly gaseous mass solidifying rapidly in a somewhat inchoate solar system.
"At the same time, the dummy will be propelled four billion years into the future, from whence it will
return much changed but for reasons we don't completely un-derstand. They will strike each other at
what is to us now and bounce off again to approximately half the chronological distance of the first trip,
where our chronar apparatus will record data of an almost solid planet, plagued by earthquakes and
possibly holding forms of sublife in the manner of certain complex molecules.
"After each collision, the chronar will return roughly half the number of years covered before,
automatically gathering information each time. The geological and historical periods we expect it to touch
are listed from I to XXV in your sheets; there will be more than twenty-five, naturally, before both balls
come to rest, but scientists feel that all periods after that number will be touched for such a short while as
to be unproductive of photographs and other material. Remember, at the end, the balls will be doing little
more than throbbing in place before coming to rest, so that even though they still ricochet centuries on
either side of the present, it will be almost unnoticeable. A question, I see."
The thin woman in gray tweeds beside Culpepper got to her feet. "IтАФI know this is irrelevant," she
began, "but I haven't been able to introduce my question into the discussion at any pertinent moment. Mr.
SecretaryтАФ"
"Acting secretary," the chubby little man in the black suit told her genially. "I'm only the acting
secretary. Go on."
"Well, I want to sayтАФMr. Secretary, is there any way at all that our post-experi-mental examination
time may be reduced? Two years is a very long time to spend inside Pike's Peak simply out of fear that
one of us may have seen enough and be unpatriotic enough to be dangerous to the nation. Once our
stories have passed the censors, it seems to me that we could be allowed to return to our homes after a
safety period of, say, three months. I have two small children and there are others hereтАФ"
"Speak for yourself, Mrs. Bryant!" the man from Security roared. "It is Mrs. Bryant, isn't it? Mrs.
Bryant of the Women's Magazine Syndicate? Mrs. Alexis Bryant." He seemed to be making minute
pencil notes across his brain.
Mrs. Bryant sat down beside Culpepper again, clutching her copy of the amended Security Code,
the special pamphlet on the Brooklyn Project and the thin mimeo-graphed sheet of paper very close to
her breast. Culpepper moved hard against the opposite arm of his chair. Why did everything have to
happen to him? Then, to make matters worse, the crazy woman looked tearfully at him as if expecting
sympathy. Culpepper stared across the booth and crossed his legs.
"You must remain within the jurisdiction of the Brooklyn Project because that is the only way that
Security can be certain that no important information leakage will occur before the apparatus has
changed beyond your present recognition of it. You didn't have to come, Mrs. BryantтАФyou volunteered.
You all volunteered. After your editors had designated you as their choices for covering this experiment,
you all had the peculiarly democratic privilege of refusing. None of you did. You recognized that to refuse
this unusual honor would have shown you incapable of thinking in terms of National Security, would
have, in fact implied a criticism of the Security Code itself from the standpoint of the usual two-year
examination time. And now this! For someone who had hitherto been thought as able and trustworthy as
yourself, Mrs. Bryant, to emerge at this late hour with such a request makes me, why it," the little man's
voice dropped to a whisper,"тАФit almost makes me doubt the effectiveness of our Security screening
methods."
Culpepper nodded angry affirmation at Mrs. Bryant, who was biting her lips and trying to show a