Lost in Babylon. Peter Lerangis
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Название: Lost in Babylon
Автор: Peter Lerangis
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Книги для детей: прочее
isbn: 9780007515042
isbn:
His eyes flickered. Professor Bhegad exhaled with relief. Behind him, Fiddle let out a whoop of joy. “You are a strong boy,” Bhegad said. “I wasn’t sure the treatment would take.”
“I didn’t think I needed treatments,” Marco replied. A rueful smile creased his face as he looked up at Aly, Cass, and me. “So much for Marco the Immortal.”
Cass leaned down and gave him a hug. “Brother M, we like you just the way you are.”
“Sounds like a song,” said Nirvana, who was clutching Fiddle’s and Torquin’s arms.
I glanced at Aly and noticed she was tearing up. I sidled close to her. I kind of wanted to put my arm around her, but I wasn’t sure if that would be too weird. She gave me a look, frowned, and angled away. “My eyes …” she said. “Must have gotten some sand in them …”
“Aly was telling me about your adventure,” Bhegad said to Marco. “The Loculus seeming to call from the river … the weather change … the city on the other side. It sounds like one of your dreams.”
“Dreams don’t change the passage of time, Professor Bhegad,” Aly said.
“It was real, dude,” Marco said. “Like some overgrown Disney set. This big old city with dirt roads and no cars and people dressed in togas, and some big old pointy buildings.”
Fiddle nodded. “Hm. Ziggurats …”
“Nope,” Marco said. “No smoking.”
“Not cigarettes, ziggurats—tiered structures, places of worship.” Bhegad scratched his head, suddenly deep in thought. “And the rest of you—you all confirm Marco’s observation?”
Nirvana threw up her arms. “When Aly talks about it, you assume it’s a dream. But when Marco says it, you take it seriously. A little gender bias, maybe?”
“My apologies, old habits learned at Yale,” Bhegad said. “I take all of you seriously. Even though you do seem to be talking about a trip into the past—which couldn’t be, pardon the expression, anything more than a fairy tale.”
“So let’s apply some science.” Aly sank to the ground and began making calculations in the sand with her finger. “Okay. Twenty-seven minutes there, about a day and sixteen-and-a-half hours here. That’s this many hours …”
“Twenty-seven minutes there equals forty-and-a-half hours here?” I asked.
“How many minutes would that be?” she said. “Sixty minutes in an hour, so multiply by sixty …”
Aly’s fingers were flying. “So twenty-seven minutes passed while we were there. But twenty-four-hundred thirty minutes passed here. What’s the ratio?”
“Ninety!” Aly’s eyes were blazing. “It means we went to a place where time travels ninety times slower than it does here.”
Fiddle looked impressed. “You go, girl.”
“Whaaat? That’s impossible!” Cass shook his head in disbelief, then glanced at Professor Bhegad uncertainly. “Isn’t it?”
I desperately tried to remember something weird I once learned. “In science class … when I wasn’t sleeping … my teacher was talking about this famous theory. She said to imagine you were in a speeding train made of glass, and you threw a ball up three feet and then caught it. To you, the ball’s going up and down three feet. But to someone outside the train, looking through those glass walls …”
“The ball moves in the direction of the train, so it travels many more than three feet—not just up and down, but forward,” Professor Bhegad said. “Yes, yes, this is the theory of special relativity …”
“She said time could be like that,” I went on. “So, like, if you were in a spaceship, and you went really fast, close to the speed of light, you’d come back and everyone on earth would be a lot older. Because, to them, time is like that ball. It goes faster when it’s just up and down instead of all stretched out.”
“So you’re thinking you guys were like the spaceship?” Nirvana said. “And that place we found—it’s like some parallel world going slower, alongside our world?”
“But if we both exist at the same time, why aren’t we seeing them?” Marco said. “They should be on the other side of the river, only moving really slow a-a-a-a-a-n-n-n-d speeeeeeeeaki-i-i-i-i-ing l-i-i-i-ke thi-i-i-i-s …”
“We have five senses and that’s all,” Aly said. “We can see, hear, touch, smell, taste. Maybe when you bend time like that, the rules are different. You can’t experience the other world, at least with regular old physical senses.”
“But you—you all managed to traverse the two worlds,” Bhegad said, “by means of some—”
“Portal,” Fiddle piped up.
“It looked like a tire,” Marco said. “Only nicer. With cool caps.”
Bhegad let out a shriek. “Oh! This is extraordinary. Revolutionary. I must think about this. I’ve been postulating the existence of wormholes all my life.”
Torquin raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Pustulate not necessary. See wormholes every day!”
“A wormhole in time,” Bhegad said. “It’s where time and space fold in on themselves. So the normal rules don’t apply. The question is, what rules do apply? These children may very well have traveled cross-dimensionally. They saw a world that occupies this space, this same part of the earth where we now stand. How does one do this? The only way is by traveling through some dimensional flux point. In other words, one needs to find a disruption in the forces of gravity, magnetism, light, atomic attraction.”
“Like the portal in Mount Onyx,” I said, “where the griffin came through.”
“Exactly,” Professor Bhegad said. “Do you realize what you were playing with? What dangers you risked? According to the laws of physics, your bodies could have been turned inside out … vaporized!”
I shrugged. “Well, I’m feeling pretty good.”
“You told me you could feel the Loculus, Jack,” Bhegad said. “The way you felt the Heptakiklos in the volcano.”
“I felt it, too,” СКАЧАТЬ