"Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Worlds of If" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

"WhyтАФI don't know. To travel in it?"

"Exactly."

"Like these time-machines that are so popular in the current magazines? To go into the future or the
past?"

"Bah! Many bahs! The future or the pastтАФpfui! It needs no van Manderpootz to see the fallacy in that.
Einstein showed us that much."

"How? It's conceivable, isn't it?"

"Conceivable? And you, Dixon Wells, studied under van Manderpootz!" He grew red with emotion, then
grimly calm. "Listen to me. You know how time varies with the speed of a systemтАФEinstein's relativity."

"Yes."

"Very well. Now suppose then that the great engineer Dixon Wells invents a machine capable of traveling
very fast, enormously fast, nine-tenths as fast as light. Do you follow? Good. You then fuel this miracle
ship for a little jaunt of a half-million miles, which, since mass (and with it inertia) increases according to
the Einstein formula with increasing speed, takes all the fuel in the world. But you solve that. You use
atomic energy. Then, since at nine-tenths light-speed, your ship weighs about as much as the sun, you
disintegrate North America to give you sufficient motive power. You start off at that speed, a hundred
and sixty-eight thousand miles per second, and you travel for two hundred and four thousand miles. The
acceleration has now crushed you to death, but you have penetrated the future." He paused, grinning
sardonically. "Haven't you?"

"Yes."

"And how far?"

I hesitated.

"Use your Einstein formula!" he screeched. "How far? I'll tell you. One second!" He grinned triumphantly.
"That's how possible it is to travel into the future. And as for the pastтАФin the first place, you'd have to
exceed light-speed, which immediately entails the use of more than an infinite number of horsepowers.
We'll assume that the great engineer Dixon Wells solves that little problem too, even though the energy
out-put of the whole universe is not an infinite number of horsepowers. Then he applies this more than
infinite power to travel at two hundred and four thousand miles per second for ten seconds. He has then
penetrated the past. How far?"

Again I hesitated.

"I'll tell you. One second!" He glared at me. "Now all you have to do is to design such a machine, and
then van Manderpootz will admit the possibility of traveling into the futureтАФfor a limited number of
seconds. As for the past, I have just explained that all the energy in the universe is insufficient for that."

"But," I stammered, "you just said that youтАФ"

"I did not say anything about traveling into either future or past, which I have just demonstrated to you to