Читать книгу Maxwell's Demon онлайн

9 страница из 77

After a little while, my eyes drifted down and found a large book, Broten’s Encyclopaedia of British Plants and Trees, sitting on the edge of my mother’s bedside table. We’d read this book together and the hundreds of descriptions, etchings and colour plates were all very familiar to me. I hauled myself up onto the mattress beside her, reached out and heaved the encyclopaedia onto my lap, and then opened it.

It fell open, and there, between two pages of text, was something I couldn’t remember having ever seen before.

A real, red rose, pressed completely flat – flat almost to transparency.

I put out a hesitant finger and found that I could move it.

Carefully, very carefully, I slid the rose loose from the lines of type.

I stayed like that for a long time, sitting quietly, just holding it in my hand.

2

Thirty Years Later

Broten’s Encyclopaedia of British Plants and Trees is the first book on my bookshelf, but you wouldn’t know what it was if you saw it. It’s cocooned in bubble wrap and the sort of UV-resistant plastic that keeps old Superman comics from falling apart in the sun.