"L. Sprague De Camp - Lest Darkness Fall" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

mad, and shut him up or kill him. Again, not much difference. But suppose he becomes a king or
a duce? What then?
"Presto, we have a new history! History is a four-dimensional web. It is a tough web. But it has
weak points. The junction places - the focal points, one might say-are weak. The back-slipping, if
it happens, would happen at these places."
"What do you mean by focal points?" asked Padway. It sounded to him like polysyllabic
nonsense.
"Oh, places like Rome, where the world-lines of many famous events intersect. Or Istanbul. Or
Babylon. You remember that archaeologist, Skrzetuski, who disappeared at Babylon in 1936?"
"I thought he was killed by some Arab holdup men."
"Ah. They never found his body! Now, Rome may soon again be the intersection point of great
events. That means the web is weakening again here."
"I hope they don't bomb the Forum," said Padway.
"Oh, nothing like that. Our Duce is much too clever to get us into a real war. But let us not talk
politics. The web, as I say, is tough. If a man did slip back, it would take a terrible lot of work to
distort it. Like a fly in a spider web that fills a room."
"Pleasant thought," said Padway.
"Is it not, though?" Tancredi turned to grin at him, then trod frantically on the brake. The Italian
leaned out and showered a pedestrian with curses.
He turned back to Padway. "Are you coming to my house for dinner tomorrow?"
"Wh-what? Why yes, I'll be glad to. I'm sailing next-"
"Si, si. I will show you the equations I have worked out. Energy must be conserved, even in
changing one's time. But nothing of this to my colleagues, please. You understand." The sallow
little man took his hands off the wheel to wag both forefingers at Padway. "It is a harmless
eccentricity. But one's professional reputation must not suffer."
"Eek!" said Padway.
Tancredi jammed on the brake and skidded to a stop behind a truck halted at the intersection of
the Via del Mare and the Piazza Aracoeli. "What was I talking about?" he asked.
"Harmless eccentricities," said Padway. He felt like adding that Professor Tancredi's driving
ranked among his less harmless ones. But the man had been very kind to him.
"Ah, yes. Things get out, and people talk. Archaeologists talk even worse than most people. Are
you married?"
"What?" Padway felt he should have gotten used to this sort of thing by now. He hadn't. "Why-
yes."
"Good. Bring your wife along." It was a surprising invitation for an Italian to issue.
"She's back in Chicago." Padway didn't feel like explaining that he and his wife had been
separated for over a year.
He could see, now, that it hadn't been entirely Betty's fault. To a person of her background and
tastes he must have seemed pretty impossible: a man who danced badly, refused to play bridge,
and whose idea of fun was to get a few similar creatures in for an evening of heavy talk on the
future of capitalism and the love life of the bullfrog. At first she had been thrilled by the idea of
traveling in far places, but one taste of living in a tent and watching her husband mutter over the
inscriptions on potsherds had cured that.
And he wasn't much to look at-rather small, with outsize nose and ears and a diffident manner. At
college they had called him Mouse Padway. Oh, well, a man in exploratory work was a fool to
marry, anyway. Just look at the divorce rate among them-anthropologists, paleontologists, and
such-
"Could you drop me at the Pantheon?" he asked. "I've never examined it closely, and it's just a
couple of blocks to my hotel."
"Yes, doc-tor, though I am afraid you will get wet. It looks like rain, does it not?"