The Fourth Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Айн Рэнд

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СКАЧАТЬ other. Some few items were the same, and the advertisements seemed to match, but the two copies of the same newspaper for the same date treated the same events as if they had happened on different worlds.

      Which they had. In different time-tracks, at any rate. One newspaper outlined the events in a world in which metaphorically all coins tossed heads, and the other world in which tails invariably turned up. The scores of the ball games were different. The racing results—for the same races—were different.

      Mr. Grebb furiously tore both papers to shreds and rumbled to himself of the perfidy of newspapers in general and this sheet in particular.

      But he had no time to meditate upon it that day. The matter of the four kegs of beer came up again. Mr. Grebb was requested to explain. Purple with fury, he bellowed. Joe Hallix was not the questioner, today. Somebody from the bookkeeping department of the Ajax Brewing Company asked involved and insulting questions.

      Mr. Grebb roared defiance. He ran his truck his way! Them delivery slips were crazy, anyhow. Customers weren’t complaining, were they? They got what they ordered and what was put on his truck, didn’t they? If Joe Hallix got things all messed up, it wasn’t his fault! He took the beer where he was told to take it! Them four kegs…

      He steamed to himself as he drove out of the brewery with a fresh load. He’d pinned that bookkeeper guy’s ears back, all right! Thought he was smart, huh? Said he was going to check back on earlier deliveries. The devil with him! Let him check all he wanted!

      But Mr. Grebb was privately worried. As he swore to himself, he drove his truck with greater insolence and abandon even than usual. And he fretted. Because the system of delivery slips was complicated. He had never fathomed all its intricacies. He had devised, instead, a system of magnificent simplicity for his own guidance, which magnificently ignored the piddling details of paperwork. He delivered the beer. But he was belligerently uneasy.

      When he returned to his boarding-house he was loudly and fulsomely enraged. The bookkeeper guy had been at him again. Not only the four kegs from yesterday were now in question. Two from the day before and one from the day before that and three from another day earlier still.

      The bookkeeper talked with asperity. Threateningly. He hadn’t any proof yet, he said, but it looked very queer. There was a lot of beer missing. Mr. Grebb, said the bookkeeper, had messed up his delivery slips so thoroughly that it was not possible yet to guess how much beer had gone astray. Maybe only sixty or seventy kegs, but it might have been going on for months.

      Mr. Grebb went to his favorite tavern that night and literally bellowed his opinion of Joe Hallix to the world. Joe Hallix had done this to him! Joe Hallix had mixed up his delivery slips just to get him in trouble. Joe Hallix was a man of minute character indeed, to hear Mr. Grebb tell it.

      Meanwhile, down in the cellar of his landlady’s house, a device of coils and wires and radio tubes reposed inert and forgotten. But a needle on one tiny dial pointed to twenty milliamperes, and another dial registered nineteen-point-six kilovolts.

      And in a certain area in a certain direction from that device there were strictly local rain-showers in a space no more than twenty feet across. Sometimes the rain fell there when it wasn’t raining anywhere else. It was exactly as if that small twenty-foot circle were somewhere connected with another weather process—or a time-track—so that it received rain quite independently of the ground about it.

      Naturally, nobody noticed it. It was night and everything was rain-wet to begin with, and nobody would have understood, anyhow.

      A couple of hundred miles away, however, there were people who would have understood it, if they’d known. There had been much learned discussion of The Mathematics of Multiple Time-Tracks, and as Mr. Grebb bellowed his fury in a tavern around the corner from his boarding house, an eminent mathematician was making an address to a scientific society.

      “Professor Muntz has disappeared,” he announced regretfully, “and his disappearance is clearly the result of his excessive shyness. However, the references to experimental evidence in his work have borne fruit. He speaks of interdimensional stresses leading to a tendency of disparate time-streams to coalesce. Then he observes that experimental evidence throws some of his equations into question. A careful study of his equations has disclosed a trivial error in assumption which, when corrected, modifies his equations into accord with the experimental results he mentions.

      “There can be no doubt that he has achieved experimental proof of the reality of time-streams, of whole systems of reality, which are parallel to but separate from the reality we know. And what does that mean? It means that if we miss a train in this reality, somewhere there is a cosmos in which we catch it. A thief who has been undetected in the universe we know, has somewhere made some slip which has led to his discovery.”

      The learned scientist went on and on with his speech, two hundred miles from where Mr. Grebb bellowed to his tavern companions of the iniquity of Joe Hallix.

      Next morning, Mr. Grebb was bleary-eyed and morose. He almost lacked appetite. He ate only twelve pancakes and almost forced himself to mop up the plate. He was uneasy. If sixty or seventy kegs of beer were missing, due to his fine scorn of bookkeeping details, he was in a bad fix. If that bookkeeper guy hunted back for six months or so and found even more missing—well, that would make it right serious. Mr. Grebb was ready to weep with vexation and terror of jail.

      But he went out of the front door. Keeping gallantly to established custom even in this time of stress, he stooped for the newspaper his landlady paid for and sadly complained she never received. As he bent over, there was a loud slapping noise. A rolled-up newspaper hit him a resounding whack in the seat of the pants.

      He roared, grabbed it, and plunged for the street to avenge the indignity. But there was no paper-boy anywhere about. The paper had materialized in mid-air above a twenty-foot circle which yesterday had received rain independently of neighboring territory.

      Mr. Grebb was formidable as he marched at last toward his bus. He was large and coarse and infuriated. He rode on the bus, scowling. A fat woman stood beside his seat. She glared at him because he did not offer his place to a fat lady. He unfolded a newspaper to intercept the glare. A minor headline caught his eye:

      AJAX BREWERY VICTIMIZED

      Underneath was a news-item. More than four hundred kegs of beer had cleverly been diverted from the regular channels of trade during the past six months. Unscrupulous customers had bought them at cut rates from a dishonest employee.

      Irregularities had been suspected, and on the previous day a bookkeeper, checking up, had quite accidentally looked in a drawer containing office-supplies in the delivery director’s desk. He found there, casually hidden, forged delivery slips used to cover past diversions, and other delivery slips made ready for use in future thefts. Confronted with the evidence, Joe Hallix had confessed to a six-months’ career in the racket and had been placed under arrest.

      Mr. Grebb stared blankly. The item was infinitely plausible, but it simply was not true. That had not happened yesterday. When he left the brewery the bookkeeper was still frankly suspicious of him.

      Then, suddenly, Mr. Grebb’s mouth dropped open. His mental processes were never clear, so he did not reason. But the newspaper story was exactly what he would like to believe, and therefore he was convinced instantly that this was exactly what Joe Hallix had been doing.

      * * * *

      He became filled with a bellicose triumph. The newspaper slipped from his hands and fell to the floor of the bus, to be trampled on and soiled and so ultimately to go unglanced-at into a trash СКАЧАТЬ