"Haldeman, Joe - No Future in It" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

"That usually takes some explaining. There's no `the' future. There's a myriad of futures radiating from every instant. If I were to drop this glass on the floor, and it broke, we would shift into a future where this bar owned one less glass."
"And the futures where the glass wasn't broken ..."
"They would be. And we would be in them; we are now."
"Doesn't it get sort of crowded up there? Billions of new futures every second?"
"You can't crowd infinity."
I was trying to think of an angle, a goofball feature. "How does this time travel work?"
"How the hell should I know? I'm just a tourist. It has something to do with chronons. Temporal Uncertainty Principle. Conservation of coincidence. I'm no engineer."
"Are there lots of these tourists?"
"Probably not, here and now. You get quite a crowd clustered around historically important events. You can't see them, of course."
"I can see you."
He shrugged. "Something went wrong. Power failure or something; someone tripped over a cable. Happens."
"They didn't try to come back and rescue you?"
"How could they? There are lots of futures but only one past. Once I materialized here, I wasn't in my own past anymore. See?" "So you can kill your own grandfather," I said.
"Why would I want to do that? He's a nice old bird."
"No, I mean, there's no paradox involved? If you killed him before you were born, you wouldn't cease to exist?"
"Of course not. I'd have to be there to kill him." He sipped. "For that matter, I could go back and kill myself, as a boy. If I could afford it. Travel gets more expensive, the closer you get to the present. Like compressing an infinitely tough spring."
"Hold it." I had him. "I'll buy another round if you can talk your way out of this one. The Earth is moving all the time, spinning around, going around the Sun; the Sun's moving through space. How the hell do you aim this time machine?"
He bleared at me. "Don't they teach you anything about relativity? Look, if you get up from the bar, go to the john, and come back in a couple of minutesЧthe bar's moved thousands of miles. But it's still here. You're on the same track, that's all."
"But I'm talking about time and you're talking about space!"
"There's a difference?" He drained his glass and slid it toward me with one finger.
I decided I'd stay long enough to find out what his con was. Maybe do a one-pager for a crime magazine. I ordered him another double. "You folks from the future can sure hold your liquor."
"Couple of centuries of medicine," he said. "I'm ninety-two years old." He looked about seventy.
Looked like I was going to have to push him for the gaff. "Seems to me you could be a millionaire. Knowing where to invest . . ."
"It's not that easy. I tried. I should have left well enough alone." His drink came and he stuck his fingertip in it; flicked a drop away. "I'm sort of a Moslem," he said. "Not supposed to drink a drop of liquor.
"People try it all the time; there's no law against it. But put yourself in this position: you're going to deliberately strand yourself two hundred years in the past. What do you do for capital? Buy old money from collectors?"
"You could take gold and diamonds."
"Sure. But if you can afford thatЧand time travel isn't cheap eitherЧwhy not invest it in your own present? Remember, once you materialize, you aren't in your own past anymore. You can never tell what might have changed. People do try it, though. Usually they take gadgets."
"Does it work?"
"Who knows? They can't come back to tell about it."
"Couldn't they build their own time machine, go back to the future?"
"Aren't you hearing me? There's no such thing as the future. Even if you could travel forward, there's no way you could find the right one."
Somebody came into the bar; I waited until the door eased shut, muting the traffic noise. "So what happened to you? You made some bad investments?"
"In spades. Seemed like a sure thing.
"Let me explain. Where I come from, almost nobody lives on Earth, just caretakers and the time travel people. It's like a big park, a big museum. Most of us live in orbital settlements, some on other planets.
"I really was a history professor, specializing in the history of technology. I saved up my money to go back and see the first flight to the Moon."
"That was in '70?"
"No, '69. It was during the launch when the accident happened. Nobody noticed me materializing; I didn't even notice until I tried to walk through someone afterward.
"Fortunately, that was a time when everybody dressed as they damn well pleased, so my clothes didn't look especially outrageous. I bummed my way down to Homestead and picked up some work sorting tomatoes, that kind of thing. Saved up enough to get fake IDs made up, eventually went back to school and wound up teaching again. Married along the way."
"The one who tried to put you in the peanut jar."
"That's right. Here's what happened. If there was one sure thing to invest in, it was space. My wife didn't agree, but there was no way I could tell her why I was so sure.
"I went ahead and invested heavily in space industriesЧreally heavily, buying on margin, wheeling, dealingЧbut my wife thought it was all going into a conservative portfolio of municipals. I even snitched some stationery from our accountant and wrote up annual reports to show her."
"I think I see what's coming." Not a bad story.
"Yeah. The Soviet-American Orbital Nonproliferation Treaty, the goddamned Proxmire Bill."
"Well, killer satellites ..."
"That's the kicker. That's really the kicker. In my future's past, it was the killer satellites that ended the possibility of nuclear war forever! They finally scrapped the missiles and settled down to shouting across tables."
"Well, you can't think we're in any danger of nuclear war now. Not realistically."
"Yeah. I liked our way better. Anyway, the bottom dropped out. I had to tell my wife that we were broke and in debt; I had to tell her everything. I thought I knew her. I thought she would believe. The rest is pretty obvious."
"Sponge boats."
"Right." He took a long drink and stared moodily into the cloudy mirror behind the bar.
"That's it?" No scam?