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

me. Once I reached the hiding place, pulling out the Renselz coils and wrapping them around me was
pure agony. By the time I entered return on the keypad I was wavering in and out of consciousness. I
finally managed to get it entered. From the Dirac sea the ripples converged and I was in my hotel room in
Santa Cruz. The ceiling had started to fall in where the girders had burned through. Fire alarms shrieked
and wailed, but there was no place to run. The room was filled with dense, acrid smoke. Trying not to
breathe, I punched out a code on the keypad, somewhen, anywhen other than that one instant and I was
in the hotel room, five days before. I gasped for breath. The woman in the hotel bed shrieked and tried to
pull the covers up. The man screwing her was too busy to pay any mind. They weren't real anyway. I
ignored them and paid a little more attention to where to go next. Back to '65, I figured. I punched in the
combo and was standing in an empty room on the thirtieth floor of a hotel just under construction. A full
moon gleamed on the silhouettes of silent construction cranes. I flexed my legs experimentally. Already
the memory of the pain was beginning to fade. That was reasonable, because it had never happened.
Time travel. It's not immortality, but it's got to be the next best thing.

You can't change the past, no matter how you try.

IN THE MORNING I explored Dancer's pad. It was crazy, a small third-floor apartment a block off
Haight Ashbury that had been converted into something from another planet. The floor of the apartment
had been completely covered with old mattresses, on top of which was a jumbled confusion of quilts,
pillows, Indian blankets, stuffed animals. You took off your shoes before coming inтАФDancer always
wore sandals, leather ones from Mexico with soles cut from old tires. The radiators, which didn't work
anyway, were spray painted in Day-Glo colors. The walls were plastered with posters: Peter Max prints,
brightly colored Eschers, poems by Allen Ginsberg, record album covers, peace-rally posters, a "Haight
Is Love" sign, FBI ten-most-wanted posters torn down from a post office with the photos of famous
antiwar activists circled in magic marker, a huge peace symbol in passion-pink. Some of the posters were
illuminated with black light and luminesced in impossible colors. The air was musty with incense and the
banana-sweet smell of dope. In one corner a record player played Sergeant Peppers' Lonely Hearts
Club Band on infinite repeat. Whenever one copy of the album got too scratchy, inevitably one of
Dancer's friends would bring in another.

He never locked the door. "Somebody wants to rip me off, well, hey, they probably need it more than I
do anyway, okay? It's cool." People dropped by any time of day or night.

I let my hair grow long. Dancer and Lisa and I spent that summer together, laughing, playing guitar,
making love, writing silly poems and sillier songs, experimenting with drugs. That was when LSD was
blooming onto the scene like sunflowers, when people were still unafraid of the strange and beautiful
world on the other side of reality. That was a time to live. I knew that it was Dancer that Lisa truly loved,
not me, but in those days free love was in the air like the scent of poppies, and it didn't matter. Not much,
anyway.

Notes for a Lecture on Time Travel (continued)

Having postulated that all of space was filled with an infinitely dense sea of negative energy particles,
Dirac went further and asked if we, in the positive-energy universe, could interact with this
negative-energy sea. What would happen, say, if you added enough energy to an electron to take it out
of the negative-energy sea? Two things: first, you would create an electron, seemingly out of nowhere.
Second, you would leave behind a "hole" in the sea. The hole, Dirac realized, would act as if it were a
particle itself, a particle exactly like an electron except for one thing: it would have the opposite charge.
But if the hole ever encountered an electron, the electron would fall back into the Dirac sea, annihilating
both electron and hole in a bright burst of energy. Eventually they gave the hole in the Dirac sea a name