"Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Worlds of If" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)I missed the airliner, of course. I was still on the Staten Bridge when I heard the roar of the catapult and
the Soviet rocket Baikal hummed over us like a tracer bullet with a long tail of flame. We got the contract anyway; the firm wired our man in Beirut and he flew up to Moscow, but it didn't help my reputation. However, I felt a great deal better when I saw the evening papers; the Baikal, flying at the north edge of the eastbound lane to avoid a storm, had locked wings with a British fruitship and all but a hundred of her five hundred passengers were lost. I had almost become "the late Mr. Wells" in a grimmer sense. I'd made an engagement for the following week with old van Manderpootz. It seems he'd transferred to N.Y.U. as head of the department of Newer PhysicsтАФthat is, of Relativity. He deserved it; the old chap was a genius if ever there was one, and even now, eight years out of college, I remember more from his course than from half a dozen in calculus, steam and gas, mechanics, and other hazards on the path to an engineer's education, So on Tuesday night I dropped in an hour or so late, to tell the truth, since I'd forgotten about the engagement until mid-evening. He was reading in a room as disorderly as ever. "Humph!" he granted. "Time changes everything but habit, I see. You were a good student, Dick, but I seem to recall that you always arrived in class toward the middle of the lectures." "I had a course in East Hall just before," I explained. "I couldn't seem to make it in time." "Well, it's time you learned to be on time," he growled. Then his eyes twinkled. "Time!" he ejaculated. "The most fascinating word in the language. Here we've used it five times (there goes the sixth timeтАФand the seventh!) in the first minute of conversation; each of us understands the other, yet science is just I sat down. "You and science are synonymous," I grinned. "Aren't you one of the world's outstanding physicists?" "One of them!" he snorted. "One of them! And who are the others?" "Oh, Corveille and Hastings and ShrimskiтАФ" "Bah! Would you mention them in the same breath with the name of van Manderpootz? A pack of jackals, eating the crumbs of ideas that drop from my feast of thoughts! Had you gone back into the last century, nowтАФhad you mentioned Einstein and de SitterтАФthere, perhaps, are names worthy to rank with (or just below) van Manderpootz!" I grinned again in amusement. "Einstein was considered pretty good, wasn't he?" I remarked. "After all, he was the first to tie time and space to the laboratory. Before him they were just philosophical concepts." "He didn't!" rasped the professor. "Perhaps, in a dim, primitive fashion, he showed the way, but IтАФI, van ManderpootzтАФam the first to seize time, drag it into my laboratory, and perform an experiment on it." "Indeed? And what sort of experiment?" "What experiment, other than simple measurement, is it possible to perform?" he snapped. |
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