The Coming of the Quantum Cats (Frederik Pohl) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги (ч. 33)

The tear in the screen was tiny. All it let through at first was air, tinged with the viny smell of tomatoes and the sweet, grassy odor of growing corn. They were noticed only as curiosities, in the huge sprawl of Levitt-Chicago, where no crops had grown for twenty years. Then a bird drifted through, unnoticed. It fluttered around, looking unsuccessfully for its nestlings. It never found them. Birdlike, it went about its business of eating and excreting. It made no change in the world at all . . . except that, back in its own time, it had eaten seeds from the kudzu vines. When it dropped them in an ungardened patch of weeds they grew; and for a century afterward that whole section of Illinois was plagued with the sturdy, migrating, unconquerable invasion of kudzu.