The Greatest Short Stories of H. G. Wells: 70+ Titles in One Edition. Герберт Уэллс

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СКАЧАТЬ well, will tell you almost all that you should know of me to comprehend how that machine came to be thought of in a mortal brain…Even when I read that simple narrative for the first time, a thousand bitter experiences had begun the teaching of my isolation among the people of my birth—I knew the story was for me. The ugly duckling that proved to be a swan, that lived through all contempt and bitterness, to float at last sublime. From that hour forth, I dreamt of meeting with my kind, dreamt of encountering that sympathy I knew was my profoundest need. Twenty years I lived in that hope, lived and worked, lived and wandered, loved even, and at last, despaired. Only once among all those millions of wondering, astonished, indifferent, contemptuous, and insidious faces that I met with in that passionate wandering, looked one upon me as I desired…looked—-“

      He paused. The Reverend Cook glanced up into his face, expecting some indication of the deep feeling that had sounded in his last words. It was downcast, clouded, and thoughtful, but the mouth was rigidly firm.

      “In short, Mr. Cook, I discovered that I was one of those superior Cagots called a genius—a man born out of my time—a man thinking the thoughts of a wiser age, doing things and believing things that men now cannot understand, and that in the years ordained to me there was nothing but silence and suffering for my soul—unbroken solitude, man’s bitterest pain. I knew I was an Anachronic Man; my age was still to come. One filmy hope alone held me to life, a hope to which I clung until it had become a certain thing. Thirty years of unremitting toil and deepest thought among the hidden things of matter and form and life, and then that, the Chronic Argo, the ship that sails through time, and now I go to join my generation, to journey through the ages till my time has come.”

THE CHRONIC ARGO

      Dr. Nebogipfel paused, looked in sudden doubt at the clergyman’s perplexed face. “You think that sounds mad,” he said, “to travel through time?”

      “It certainly jars with accepted opinions,” said the clergyman, allowing the faintest suggestion of controversy to appear in his intonation, and speaking apparently to the Chronic Argo. Even a clergyman of the Church of England you see can have a suspicion of illusions at times.

      “It certainly does jar with accepted opinions,” agreed the philosopher cordially. “It does more than that—it defies accepted opinions to mortal combat. Opinions of all sorts, Mr. Cook—Scientific Theories, Laws, Articles of Belief, or, to come to elements, Logical Premises, Ideas, or whatever you like to call them—all are, from the infinite nature of things, so many diagrammatic caricatures of the ineffable—caricatures altogether to be avoided save where they are necessary in the shaping of results—as chalk outlines are necessary to the painter and plans and sections to the engineer. Men, from the exigencies of their being, find this hard to believe.”

      The Rev. Elijah Ulysses Cook nodded his head with the quiet smile of one whose opponent has unwittingly given a point.

      “It is as easy to come to regard ideas as complete reproductions of entities as it is to roll off a log. Hence it is that almost all civilised men believe in the reality of the Greek geometrical conceptions.”

      “Oh! pardon me, sir,” interrupted Cook. “Most men know that a geometrical point has no existence in matter, and the same with a geometrical line. I think you underrate…”

      “Yes, yes, those things are recognised,” said Nebogipfel calmly; “but now…a cube. Does that exist in the material universe?”

      “Certainly.”

      “An instantaneous cube?”

      “I don’t know what you intend by that expression.”

      “Without any other sort of extension; a body having length, breadth, and thickness, exists?”

      “What other sort of extension can there be?” asked Cook, with raised eyebrows.

      “Has it never occurred to you that no form can exist in the material universe that has no extension in time?…Has it never glimmered upon your consciousness that nothing stood between men and a geometry of four dimensions—length, breadth, thickness, and duration—but the inertia of opinion, the impulse from the Levantine philosophers of the bronze age?”

      “Putting it that way,” said the clergyman, “it does look as though there was a flaw somewhere in the notion of tridimensional being; but” …He became silent, leaving that sufficiently eloquent “but” to convey all the prejudice and distrust that filled his mind.

      “When we take up this new light of a fourth dimension and reexamine our physical science in its illumination,” continued Nebogipfel, after a pause, “we find ourselves no longer limited by hopeless restriction to a certain beat of time—to our own generation. Locomotion along lines of duration—chronic navigation comes within the range, first, of geometrical theory, and then of practical mechanics. There was a time when men could only move horizontally and in their appointed country. The clouds floated above them, unattainable things, mysterious chariots of those fearful gods who dwelt among the mountain summits. Speaking practically, men in those days were restricted to motion in two dimensions; and even there circumambient ocean and hypoborean fear bound him in. But those times were to pass away. First, the keel of Jason cut its way between the Symplegades, and then in the fulness of time, Columbus dropped anchor in a bay of Atlantis. Then man burst his bidimensional limits, and invaded the third dimension, soaring with Montgolfier into the clouds, and sinking with a diving bell into the purple treasure-caves of the waters. And now another step, and the hidden past and unknown future are before us. We stand upon a mountain summit with the plains of the ages spread below.”

      Nebogipfel paused and looked down at his hearer.

      The Reverend Elijah Cook was sitting with an expression of strong distrust on his face. Preaching much had brought home certain truths to him very vividly, and he always suspected rhetoric. “Are those things figures of speech,” he asked; “or am I to take them as precise statements? Do you speak of travelling through time in the same way as one might speak of Omnipotence making His pathway on the storm, or do you—a—mean what you say?”

      Dr. Nebogipfel smiled quietly. “Come and look at these diagrams,” he said, and then with elaborate simplicity he commenced to explain again to the clergyman the new quadridimensional geometry. Insensibly Cook’s aversion passed away, and seeming impossibility grew possible, now that such tangible things as diagrams and models could be brought forward in evidence. Presently he found himself asking questions, and his interest grew deeper and deeper as Nebogipfel slowly and with precise clearness unfolded the beautiful order of his strange invention. The moments slipped away unchecked, as the Doctor passed on to the narrative of his research, and it was with a start of surprise that the clergyman noticed the deep blue of the dying twilight through the open doorway.

      “The voyage,” said Nebogipfel concluding his history, “will be full of undreamt-of dangers—already in one brief essay I have stood in the very jaws of death—but it is also full of the divines’ promise of undreamt-of joy. Will you come? Will you walk among the people of the Golden Years?…”

      But the mention of death by the philosopher had brought flooding back to the mind of Cook, all the horrible sensations of that first apparition.

      “Dr. Nebogipfel…one question?” He hesitated. “On your hands…Was it blood?”

      Nebogipfel’s countenance fell. He spoke slowly.

      “When I had stopped my machine, I found myself in this room as it used to be. Hark!”

      “It СКАЧАТЬ