Conto que li há muitos anos na revista Argosy - não consigo lembrar o autor

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O personagem principal descobre que um dia espontaneamente ele pode entrar em um estado acelerado que o torna invisível. De fato, as pessoas ao redor dele parecem congeladas, mas na verdade estão progredindo em um ritmo infinitamente lento. Ele pode fazer seus dias de trabalho e emergir para descobrir que apenas segundos ou minutos se passaram no mundo "normal". É claro que é uma parábola da relatividade, mas bem escrita, acessível e esclarecedora, especialmente para o leitor mais jovem. Ele percebe que depois de fazer isso repetidamente está envelhecendo rapidamente - é tudo o que me lembro de um conto que li, talvez o 35 ou mais anos atrás na revista Argosy (Reino Unido) - não se lembra do autor, ou mesmo do resultado .

por AlanR 26.03.2017 / 00:20

1 resposta

Exceto pela parte de estar em carraca isso parece muito com "Os seis dedos do tempo", uma novela 1960 de RA Lafferty que também foi a resposta para a esta pergunta. Publicado pela primeira vez em If, Setembro 1960 (que está disponível no Internet Archive), também está disponível em Projeto Gutenberg.

O personagem principal, Charles Vincent, conta a história ao seu médico:

Vincent said, “It may not sound so silly if I tell it quickly. I awoke this morning to some very puzzling incidents. It seemed that time itself had stopped, or that the whole world had gone into super-slow motion. The water would neither flow nor boil, and fire would not heat food. The clocks, which I first believed had stopped, crept along at perhaps a minute an hour. The people I met in the streets appeared dead, frozen in lifelike attitudes. And it was only by watching them for a very long time that I perceived that they did indeed have motion. One car I saw creeping slower than the most backward snail, and a dead man at the wheel of it. I went to it, opened the door, and put on the brake. I realized after a time that the man was not dead. But he bent forward and broke his face on the steering wheel. It must have taken a full minute for his head to travel no more than ten inches, yet I was unable to prevent his hitting the wheel. I then did other bizarre things in a world that had died on its feet. I walked many miles through the city, and then I sat for hours in the park. I went to the office and let myself in. I accomplished work that must have taken me twenty hours. I then took a nap at my desk. When I awoke on the arrival of the others, it was six minutes to eight in the morning of the same day, today. Not two hours had passed from my rising, and time was back to normal. But the things that happened in that time that could never be compressed into two hours.”

Ele envelhece rápido:

Dr. Mason made an entry in his private journal: “Charles Vincent, a completely authenticated case of premature aging, one of the most clear-cut in all gerontology. This man was known to me for years, and I here aver that as of one year ago he was of normal appearance and physical state, and that his chronology is also correct, I having also known his father. I examined the subject during the period of his illness, and there is no question at all of his identity, which has also been established for the record by fingerprinting and other means. I aver that Charles Vincent at the age of thirty is dead of old age, having the appearance and organic condition of a man of ninety.”

26.03.2017 / 01:06