"Paul Levinson - Loose Ends (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

"I know what you're saying." Now she looked at him very
intently. "You want me to take that leap of faith with you and
your story. You want me to assume that what you're saying is
true, even though I have no evidence for it and it flies in the
face of reason. You want me to say, look, I know this is crazy,
but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, entertain
your insanity, see where it leads us. In other words, pretense
isn't good enough for you -- you want to make this really hard
for me." She turned away.
"Something like that, right," Jeff said.
 "What is it about me that's always attracted to lunatics,"
she murmured. She turned around and kissed him full on the
lips.
***
"Two Papaya." Jeff held up two fingers to the man at the
Papaya King on 3rd Avenue and 86th Street. "One to drink here
and a quart to go." There was nothing like this drink in his
century. Whatever the hell it was -- whatever its special
mixture of pulp and sugars -- it was delicious.
He walked down 86th Street, package in hand, towards his
place by the East River. His place ... he was feeling more and
more comfortable in this place, and that made him feel
uncomfortable, out of place. There were things he missed from
his world -- faces on the phone, words on the screen, poles of
the planet as easily accessible as the north and south parts of
this borough -- but he missed them less and less. Especially
when he was with Laura.
Still... He picked up a copy of the _Daily News_. Johnson
was on the cover, saying he was going ahead full force on the
space program, and on the inside was a picture of Gus Grissom.
Jeff had thought about doing something to prevent the fire that
would kill Grissom, White, and Chafee in their Apollo 1 capsule
on January 27, 1967. But that was still over a year and a half
away, and he couldn't be sure what impact that might have on the
Moon landing, which was still the lonely high watermark of human
penetration of space. No, he didn't dare mess with that --
better to bide his time, and wait the 19 further years, almost
to the day, for a chance to avert the Challenger catastrophe,
and the fatal blow it had delivered, in retrospect, to the space
program.
But Jeff didn't suffer abidances of time very well. What
was the point of time travel, anyway, if not to short-circuit
ordinary time, make new things happen? It seemed the last thing
that should be required of the time traveler was patience. Jeff
knew now, ever since his experience with Sarah, that he could
change the future -- which meant that his existence here could
make a difference. But he had to get some word back to his team
in 2084. How? He'd even tried taking a page from Asimov --
what was that book, _The End of Eternity_? -- and placed small,
discrete, but clearly informative ads in a variety of