"Geoffrey A. Landis - Ripples in the Dirac Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

To San Francisco, June 8, 1965. A warm breeze riffles across dandelion-speckled grass, while puffy
white clouds form strange and wondrous shapes for our entertainment. Yet so very few people pause to
enjoy it. They scurry about, diligently preoccupied, believing that if they act busy enough, they must be
important. "They hurry so," I say. "Why can't they slow down, sit back, enjoy the day?"

"They're trapped in the illusion of time," says Dancer. He lies on his back and blows a soap bubble, his
hair flopping back long and brown in a time when "long" hair meant anything below the ear. A puff of
breeze takes the bubble down the hill and into the stream of pedestrians. They uniformly ignore it.
"They're caught in the belief that what they do is important to some future goal." The bubble pops against
a briefcase, and Dancer blows another. "You and I, we know how false an illusion that is. There is no
past, no future, only the now, eternal."

He was right, more right than he could have possibly imagined.

Once I, too, was preoccupied and self-important. Once I was brilliant and ambitious. I was twenty-eight
years old, and I made the greatest discovery in the world.

FROM MY hiding place I watched him come up the service elevator. He was thin almost to the point of
starvation, a nervous man with stringy blond hair and an armless white T-shirt. He looked up and down
the hall, but failed to see me hidden in the janitor's closet. Under each arm was a two-gallon can of
gasoline, in each hand another. He put down three of the cans and turned the last one upside down, then
walked down the hall, spreading a pungent trail of gasoline. His face was blank. When he started on the
second can, I figured it was about enough. As he passed my hiding spot, I walloped him over the head
with a wrench, and called hotel security. Then I went back to the closet and let the ripples of time
converge.

I arrived in a burning room, flames licking forth at me, the heat almost too much to bear. I gasped for
breathтАФa mistakeтАФand punched at the keypad.

Notes on the Theory and Practice of Time Travel:

1. Travel is possible only into the past.

2. The object transported will return to exactly the time and place of departure.

3. It is not possible to bring objects from the past to the present.

4. Actions in the past cannot change the present.

ONE TIME I tried jumping back a hundred million years, to the Cretaceous, to see dinosaurs. All the
picture books show the landscape as being covered with dinosaurs. I spent three days wandering around
a swampтАФin my new tweed suitтАФ-before catching even a glimpse of any dinosaur larger than a basset
hound. That oneтАФa theropod of some sort, I don't know whichтАФskittered away as soon as it caught a
whiff of me. Quite a disappointment.

MY PROFESSOR in transfinite math used to tell stories about a hotel with an infinite number of rooms.
One day all the rooms are full, and another guest arrives. "No problem," says the desk clerk. He moves
the person in room one into room two, the person in room two into room three, and so on. Presto! A
vacant room.