（外文电子版资料）Knight, Damon - Anachron.pdf

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Damon%20Knight%20-%20Anachron.txt ANACHRON by DAMON KNIGHT First published in If Januar 54 THE BODY was never found. And for that reason alone, there was no body to find. It sounds like inverted logic -- which, in a sense, it is -- but theres no paradox involved. It was a perfectly orderly and explicable event, even though it could only have happened to a Castellare. Odd fish, the Castellare brothers. Sons of a Scots-Englishwoman and an expatriate Italian, born in England, educated on the Continent, they were at ease anywhere in the world and at home nowhere. Nevertheless, in their middle years, they had become settled men. Expatriates like their father, they lived on the island of Ischia, off the Neapolitan coast, in a palace -- quattrocento, very fine, with peeling cupids on the walls, a multitude of rats, no central heating and no neighbors. They went nowhere, no one except their agents and their lawyers came to them. Neither had ever married. Each, at about the age of thirty, had given up the world of people for an inner world of more precise and more enduring pleasures. Each was an amateur -- a fanatical, compulsive amateur. They had been born out of their time. Peters passion was virtu. He collected relentlessly, it would not be too much to say savagely; he collected as some men hunt big game. His taste was catholic, and his acquisitions filled the huge rooms of the palace and half the vaults under them -- paintings, statuary, enamels, porcelain, glass, crystal, metalwork. At fifty, he was a round little man with small, sardonic eyes and a careless patch of pinkish goatee. Harold Castellare, Peters talented brother, was a scientist. An amateur scientist. He belonged in the nineteenth century, as Peter was a throwback to a still earlier epoch. Modern science is largely a matter of teamwork and drudgery, both impossible concepts to a Castellare