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

"You a social worker? Undercover social worker?" He smiled wryly.
"Is there such a thing?"
"Should be. I know. You're a writer."
"When I get work, yeah. How could you tell, Sherlock?"
"You've got two pens in your pocket and you want to hear a story." He smiled. "Steal a
story, maybe. But you'll never get it published. It's too fantastic."
"But true."
"It's true, all right. Thank you kindly." He touched his new drink to see whether it was
real, then drained off the old one in one gulp and sighed.
"My name's Bill Caddis. Doctor William Caddis, it used to be."
"Medical doctor?"
"I detect a note of reproof. As if no medico everтАФwell. No, I was an academic, newly
tenured at Florida State. History department. Modern American history."
"Hard to get a job then as it is now?"
"Just about. I was a real whiz."
"But you got fired in '83."
"That's right. And it's not easy to fire a tenured professor."
"What, boffing the little girls?"
That was the only time he laughed that day, a kind of wheeze. "Undergraduates were
made for boffing. No, I was dismissed on grounds of mental instability; with my wife's help,
my then wife, they almost had me institutionalized."
"Strong stuff."
"Strong." He stared into his drink and swirled it around. "I never know how to start this.
I've told dozens of people and they all think I'm crazy before I get halfway into it. You'll
think I'm crazy too."
"Just jump in feet first. Like you say, I'm a writer. I can believe in six impossible things
before my first drink in the morning."
"All right. I'm not from ... here."
 A loony, I thought; there goes the price of a double. "Another planet," I said seriously.
"See? Now you want me to say something about UFOs and how I'm bringing the secret of
eternal peace to mankind." He raised the glass to me. "Thanks for the drink."
I caught his arm before he could slug it down. "Wait. I'm sorry. Go on."
"Am I wrong?"
"You're right, but go on. You don't act crazy."
He set the drink down. "Layman's error. Some of the most reasonable people you meet are
strictly Almond Joy."
"If you're not from `here,' where are you from?"
"Miami." He smiled and took a sip. "I'm a time traveler. I'm from a future."
I just nodded.
"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?"