Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds - Dark Interlude

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 33.74KB 6 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Dark Interlude

Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds

Sheriff Ben Rand's eyes were grave. He said, "Okay, boy. You feel kind of jittery;

that's natural. But if your story's straight, don't worry. Don't worry about nothing.

Everything'll be all right, boy."

"It was three hours ago, Sheriff`," Allenby said. "I'm sorry it took me so long to

get into town and that I had to wake you up. But Sis was hysterical a while. I had

to try and quiet her down, and then I had trouble starting the jalopy."

"Don't worry about waking me up, boy. Being sheriff's a full-time job. And it

ain't late, anyway; I just happened to turn in early tonight. Now let me get a few

things straight. You say your name's Lou Allenby. That's a good name in these

parts, Allenby. You kin of Rance Allenby, used to run the feed business over in

Cooperville? I went to school with Rance .. . Now about the fella who said he

come from the future . . ."

The Presider of the Historical Research Department was skeptical to the last. He

argued, "I am still of the opinion that the project is not feasible. There arc paradoxes

involved which present insurmountable—"

Doctor Matthe, the noted physicist, interrupted politely, "Undoubtedly, sir, you

are familiar with the Dichotomy?"

The presidor wasn't, so he remained silent to indicate that he wanted an

explanation.

"Zeno propounded the Dichotomy. He was a Greek phi-losopher of roughly five

hundred years before the ancient prophet whose birth was used by the primitives to

mark the beginning of their calendar. The Dichotomy states that it is impossible to

cover any given distance. The argument: First, half the distance must be traversed,

then half of the remaining distance, then again half of what remains, and so on. It

fol-lows that some portion of the distance to be covered always remains, and

therefore motion is impossible."

"Not analogous," the presidor objected. "In the first place, your Greek assumed

that any totality composed of an infinite number of parts must, itself, be infinite,

whereas we know that an infinite number of elements make up a finite total.

Besides—"

Matthe smiled gently and held up a hand. "Please, sir, don't misunderstand me. I

do not deny that today we understand Zeno's paradox. But believe me, for long

centuries the best minds the human race could produce could not explain it."

The presidor said tactfully, "I fail to see your point, Doctor Matthe. Please forgive

my inadequacy. What possible connec-tion has this Dichotomy of Zeno's with your

projected expedi-tion into the past?"

"I was merely drawing a parallel, sir. Zeno conceived the paradox proving that it

was impossible to cover any distance, nor were the ancients able to explain it. But

did that prevent them from covering distances? Obviously not. Today, my

as-sistants and I have devised a method to send our young friend here, Jan Obreen,

into the distant past. The paradox is im-mediately pointed out—suppose he should

kill an ancestor or otherwise change history? I do not claim to be able to explain how

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds - Dark Interlude.pdf

共6页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds - Dark Interlude

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: