"Ian Watson - Early in the Evening" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

Naturally Richard and Elisabeth had discussed this when the kids were
finally watching television.

Children did not experience to the same degree as adults the necessity to
perform -- to involve oneself fully and methodically in the sequence of
each day. Partly the grown-ups were succumbing to group pressure. Yet
there was also a personal, almost ontological aspect, powerfully
superstitious.

"If we don't all follow the sequence," Richard had said, "then the sequence
mightn't carry us along with it."

"We might miss out on the results," agreed Elisabeth.

Of course everyone lived for the results. The freezer food, the microwave
oven, the phone, the soft bed -- which, come the morning, would once
again be a sack stuffed with straw.

In the afternoons industrialisation occurred. In its own way industry was
dirty and fatiguing. Yet it augured a progressively neater and easier world.
Where the strip-fields and woodland had once been, would stand estates of
houses and zones of light industry. Newspapers would appear around four
o'clock. By six o'clock there was radio; by six-thirty, television.

And so many more people too! What had been a large village would have
grown into a town. The Lucases would be able to invite their closest
friends Paul and Sally Devizes over.

Closest friends, nearest neighbours -- though only later in the day. Paul
and Sally did not share the earlier hours with the Lucases. A science
programme on television had hypothesised that small disconnected
bubbles of existence progressively combined into bigger bubbles which all
finally merged. The past had frothed; the past had foamed. All of those
earlier micro-bubbles were synchronous in some higher dimension. They
shared the same historical past. Yet in ordinary dimensionality the

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Early, in the Evening - a story by Ian Watson

occupants simply did not interact.

Thus there was no contradiction in shared experience: of strip-fields and
hovels, of common meadow and cattle, of work and woodland, of the
rutted muddy tracks. Nonetheless, each bubble remained a world unto
itself until the bubbles joined and people were reunited with one another --
as well as with their real homes and their cars and their electronics.

While the Lucases and the Devizes had been watching that science show
about time-bubbles in Richard and Elisabeth's lounge, Jonathon and