"Simon Hawke - Time Wars 02 - The Timekeeper Conspiracy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

He remembered, with a sense of wry amusement, that the fascination with his new career had been
incredibly short--lived. It had worn off on his very first mission, when he had learned for the first time in
his life what it meant to be afraid.
He had learned the hard way that the past was nowhere near being as glamorous and romantic as he
had supposed. He had gone on forced marches with Scipio's Roman legions. He had gone on mounted
raids with Attila and his Huns and he had flown aerial sorties with the "flying circus" of Baron Manfred
von Richthofen. He had seen squalor, disease, death, and devastation. He had learned that life in the
Temporal Corps was far more violent and primitive than he could ever have imagined. Far more
ephemeral, too. He had lived for only one thing thenтАФto beat the odds and to survive, to com-plete his
tour of duty and get out. He had, but along the way, something inside of him had changed.
He had returned to civilian life, to a laboratory job where he worked in pleasant, sterile, safe
surroundings. Nothing had changed. At least, it had seemed so at first. On the surface, it felt as though he
had never left, as though his experiences in the service had been a part of some particularly vivid dream.
Yet, it was a dream that wouldn't quite let go. Like the dis-orientating traces of a nightmare that linger on
into the morn-ing, the memories of bygone battles clung to him, leaving their mark. It had not taken him
long to discover a hard truth about the soldiers of the time wars. They leave pieces of themselves
scattered throughout all of time. They can't go home again.
He had fallen victim to the restlessness, the boredom, the feeling out of place. He had continued
fighting deep inside, even though the battles had been left behind. He had become a dog of war, unsuited
to a life of domesticity.
He felt uncomfortable with the way civilians reacted when they learned that he was a veteran of the
time wars. They wanted to know what it was like, but somehow, he couldn't tell them. He would try, but
the answers he gave were never those which they expected. What he tried to tell them, they didn't really
want to hear. He was not a soldier anymore, but they were still civilians.
The decision to re-enlist had not been an easy one to make. It had been like standing on a very high
diving board over a pool filled with ice cold water. It was difficult to summon up the courage to dive in,
but once he had committed himself, all the tension simply went away. Things had come full circle, only
now it felt a little different.
It all felt pleasingly familiar. He had always thought that he hated army life and it came as something
of a shock to him when he discovered just how comfortable it felt to be back in.
He had re-enlisted with the rank of captain. The promotion had come as a result of his last
assignment, an historical ad-justment in 12th-century England. When it was all over, he had vowed that
he would never go through anything like that again.
An adjustment was nothing like a standard mission. It wasn't like being infiltrated into the ranks of
soldiers of the past, fighting side by side with them to help determine the out-come of a war being fought
on paper in the 27th century. In an adjustment, temporal continuity had been disturbed. What Dr.
Albrecht Mensinger had referred to as a "ripple" had been set into motion and there was a threat of
serious tem-poral contamination. The timeflow was endangered and the timestream could be split. That,
the greatest of all possible temporal disasters, had to be prevented at all costs.
The timestream split, Mensinger's solution to the grand-father paradox, had been the focus of the
Temporal SALT talks of 2515, when the treaty that governed the fighting of the time wars had been
hammered out and all power given to the extranational Referee Corps, who acted as the managers and
final arbiters of all temporal conflicts.
The past was absolute. It had happened, it had been ex-perienced, it could not be changed. Prior to
the treaty, it had been believed that the inertia of the timeflow would prevent all but the most limited and
insignificant temporal disruptions. Dr. Mensinger had proved otherwise, using the grandfather paradox for
his model.
The riddle posed the question of what would happen if a man were to travel back into the past, to a
point in time before his grandfather procreated a son. If that time traveler then killed his own grandfather,
then his father would not be born, which meant that he would not be born. Hence, the grand-father