Planet Stories Super Pack #2. Ray Bradbury, Nelson S. Bond, Leigh Brackett
Читать онлайн книгу.
convincing proof needed, he had but to glance at the sky. There shone not the lone, familiar Sun of Earth…but two suns! A binary system. One golden-yellow like Sol, the other a bluish-white globe of radiance.
"No," answered the elderly man, "this is neither the Earth from which you came nor any planet of its system. This is the planet Nadron, satellite of the twin suns, Kraagol and Thuumion, in the fourth galactic level."
Triumph was a bursting bomb in Morris’ heart.
"Then it was a success, after all!" he cried. "Then Townsend was right! If only he had lived to see this day! A success…and all because Garroway’s scientists, playing with an instrument they did not understand, succeeded where we had failed for years!
"But…but your planet is unfamiliar to me; I do not know your suns by the names you have given them. Your system lies just where in relation to the galactic center? How many miles…or light years…are we from my native Earth?"
The old man looked at him oddly for a moment, then:
"We are no miles from your Earth, my friend," he announced quietly, "and the distance may be measured in seconds... not light-years."
Dirk stared, bewilderment in his eyes.
"I…I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir. I hope you will forgive me. Perhaps you are joking—?"
"It is no jest, my boy, but the simple truth. Earth and Nadron are…but, stay! Let me prove my point otherwise. Has it not occurred to you to wonder that we, the people of a foreign world, know your language?"
Dirk said wonderingly, "Why…why, that’s right; you do! But how—?"
"Because," explained the elder, "we have listened to it being spoken for many, many years. Over our visors we have both heard and watched you on your neighboring world."
"Neighboring world?"
"How came you here?" asked the old man. "What means of propulsion brought you hither?"
That, at least, Dirk knew. He answered eagerly.
"I came here through the medium of the greatest discovery ever made by man. The teleport, a machine invented by Robert Townsend. A perfect solution to the long puzzling problem of material transport through Space. It disassembles the atoms of any body placed in its transmitting chamber, and reconstructs that body at a destination selected by a setting of its dials.
"Through circumstances not of my own choosing, I was a subject of that machine. I was forced into the transmitter by…well, it does not matter whom…and my body broadcast to this spot. Though I do not yet, sir, understand just where I am, or exactly how I reached here—"
The old man shook his head regretfully.
"I am sorry, my boy, to tell you the machine did not work as was planned. Its theory was sound; in one respect it performed as expected. It did disassemble your atomic components, did reconstruct your body elsewhere. But it was to no far bourne your journey carried you.
"Your body still stands in exactly the spot it stood before the machine operated! "
*
For a long, uncomprehending moment Dirk Morris gaped at his informant. At last his bedazement found words.
"Oh, now, surely you can’t expect me to believe—"
"No," interrupted the graybeard gently, "not without visual evidence. Rima, my dear—?"
He turned to the girl, who nodded and from the folds of her garment produced a shimmering crystal object; a mirror of some sort, or a lens. This she handed to Dirk.
"If you will look through this—?" she suggested.
Morris lifted the crystal to his eyes wonderingly…then almost dropped it in his excitement!
Beneath his feet still lay the lush greensward of an alien world, but through the curious crystal he gazed upon no panorama of soft, rolling hills and pleasant valleys. Before him lay the image of a scene he had but recently quitted: the execution dock of Graed Garroway’s prison!
A few feet to his right stood the metal chamber into which he had been thrust, the supposed "disintegration cell." Through the viewpane of this the Overlord was peering, a grim smirk of satisfaction on his lips. As Dirk watched, Garroway turned and gestured to the guardsman whose hand had depressed the activating switch. Dirk heard no words, but could easily read the movement of the Emperor’s lips.
"Enough! It is done! "
With an instinct born of illogic, Dirk reached forth as if to grip the throat of the murderous Garroway. In doing so, the crystal left his eyes. Instantly the scene vanished. He looked once more upon distance-purpled hills softly limned in the splendor of two suns.
The girl laughed softly.
"Confusing at first, isn’t it? But you’ll soon—"
"Please!" begged Dirk hoarsely. "I must see—" He placed the mirrorlike object once more to his eyes, saw Graed Garroway lead the way from the execution chamber. Awkwardly, uncertainly, Morris took a step forward…another. Though he knew his feet trod the soil of the planet Nadron, to his eyes it seemed he glided forward across the floor of the prison.
The door swung to behind Garroway and his followers, and involuntarily Dirk flinched…then grunted reproof at his own needless gesture. So far as he was concerned, that heavy metal barrier did not exist. For the briefest fraction of an instant his vision was blotted by jet darkness, then he stood outside the door, looking down the corridor.
He hastened forward, stumbling, as feet that appeared to be traversing smooth floors actually trod uneven soil, and paused at last, an invisible presence at the tableau next enacted. He witnessed his friends’ release from the cell, read the movement of Hardesty’s dry lips as Neil whispered, "It…it is over? " He saw Garroway’s boastful warning, Brian’s hot denial, then watched—first with dazed incomprehension, then with fierce understanding—the betrayal, panic and execution of Fred Meacher.
*
When Meacher’s corpse lay on the floor at…or so it seemed…his very feet, and the comrades left the hallway, he would again have followed them. But at that moment he landed with a solid bump against something hard, and with a start he looked from the crystal to find a tree before him. More than a hundred yards away waited those who had befriended him. He retraced his steps slowly to their company.
"Now you understand and believe, my boy?" the kindly alien asked.
"I believe," said Dirk simply. "But, sir—"
"My name, man of Earth, is Slador. On this world, I am known as the Ptan Slador, which is to say ‘teacher.’ This is my daughter, Rima."
"I am called Morris. Dirk Morris. I also—" Dirk spoke bitterly—"have a number, as have all Earthmen of this unhappy century. Yes, Ptan Slador, I believe, but even yet I do not understand. I stand in one world, but looking through your crystal I see into another: my own. Why is this?"
"Because, Dirk Morris, our two worlds lie adjacent."
"Adjacent? You mean in Space?"
"I mean in Space-Time. Look, my young friend…your Earth science knows of the atom?"
"But of course. It is the building-block of matter. The smallest indivisible unit—"
"Exactly. Yet even this minute fleck of matter, the building-block of worlds, so small that it cannot be observed under man’s strongest microscopes, is composed of ninety-nine per cent empty space!
"Or, let me say, rather…what appears to be such to the men of all universes. Actually, there is no emptiness in the atom. It is composed of solid matter, but the individual zerons of this single entity are all vibrating at a different frequency in the Greater Universe which includes all of Space and Time.
"Consequently, you on Earth, existing at one rate of vibration, see an entire universe vibrating