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

tremendous interest in the activities on the laboratory floor.
"The question was irrelevant. Highly irrelevant. It took up time which I had in-tended to devote to a
more detailed discussion of the popular aspects of chronar and its possible uses in industry. But Mrs.
Bryant must have her little feminine outburst. It makes no difference to Mrs. Bryant that our nation is daily
surrounded by more and more hostility, more and more danger. These things matter not in the slightest to
Mrs. Bryant. All she is concerned with are the two years of her life that her country asks her to surrender
so that the future of her own children may be more secure."
The acting secretary smoothed his black jumper and became calmer. Tension in the booth
decreased.
"Activation will occur at any moment now, so I will briefly touch upon those most interesting periods
which the chronar will record for us and from which we expect the most useful data. I and II, of course,
since they are the periods at which the Earth was forming into its present shape. Then III, the
Pre-Cambrian Period of the Proterozoic, one billion years ago, the first era in which we find distinct
records of lifeтАФcrustaceans and algae for the most part. VI, a hundred twenty-five million years in the
past, covers the Middle Jurassic of the Mesozoic. This excursion into the so-called 'Age of Reptiles' may
provide us with photographs of dinosaurs and solve the old riddle of their coloring, as well as
photographs, if we are fortunate, of the first appearance of mammals and birds. Finally, VIII and IX, the
Oligocene and Miocene Epochs of the Tertiary Period, mark the emergence of man's earliest ancestors.
Unfortunately, the chronar will be oscillating back and forth so rapidly by that time that the chance of any
decent recordingтАФ"
A gong sounded. The hand of the clock touched the red mark. Five of the techni-cians below pulled
switches and, almost before the journalists could lean forward, the two spheres were no longer visible
through the heavy plastic screen. Their places were empty.
"The chronar has begun its journey to four billion years in the past! Ladies and gentlemen, an historic
momentтАФa profoundly historic moment! It will not return for a little while; I shall use the time in pointing
up and exposing the fallacies of theтАФah, federation of chronic sighers!"
Nervous laughter rippled at the acting secretary to the executive assistant on press relations. The
twelve journalists settled down to hearing the ridiculous ideas torn apart.
"As you know, one of the fears entertained about travel to the past was that the most
innocent-seeming acts would cause cataclysmic changes in the present. You are probably familiar with
the fantasy in its most currently popular formтАФif Hitler had been killed in 1930, he would not have
forced scientists in Germany and later occupied countries to emigrate, this nation might not have had the
atomic bomb, thus no third atomic war, and Venezuela would still be part of the South American
continent.
"The traitorous Shayson and his illegal federation extended this hypothesis to include much more
detailed and minor acts such as shifting a molecule of hydrogen that in our past really was never shifted.
"At the time of the first experiment at the Coney Island Subproject, when the chronar was sent back
for one-ninth of a second, a dozen different laboratories checked through every device imaginable,
searched carefully for any conceivable change. There were none! Government officials concluded that the
time stream was a rigid affair, past, present, and future, and nothing in it could be altered. But Shayson
and his cohorts were not satisfied: theyтАФ"


I. Four billion years ago. The chronar floated in a cloudlet of silicon dioxide above the boiling
Earth and languidly collected its data with automatically operating instruments. The vapor it had
displaced condensed and fell in great, shining drops.


"тАФinsisted that we should do no further experimenting until we had checked the mathematical
aspects of the problem yet again. They went so far as to state that it was possible that if changes