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

"Yeah, we were lovers. Once. A long time ago -- actually,
in a time which doesn't even goddamn exist yet. Does that
matter?"
"Did you love her?" Laura asked.
"Yes," Jeff said, tears in his eyes. "But not as much as I
love you."
Laura put her arms around his neck, stroked his chest.
"That's all that matters to me. I love you too."
Jeff rubbed the side of his face against her hand.
"What does this mean?" Laura asked. "I mean, your friend
getting killed..."
"It means they sent her back too -- maybe to find me here,
who knows, maybe they got one of my messages after all," Jeff
said. "Or maybe they were trying to send her back to 1985, to do
the same job I was supposed to do, but for some reason she got
sucked back here to the 1960s too. I don't know."
"What are you -- we -- going to do now?" Laura asked.
"I don't know," Jeff said.
***
"I don't really want to go to this party," Jeff said,
trudging reluctantly after Laura up a steep street in
Washington Heights.
"Come on," Laura turned around and pulled his hand. "It's
been over a month since you found out about Rena, and all you've
been doing is moping and brooding -- it's time you got out and
saw some people. It's summer already, for God's sake."
"Not moping -- thinking," Jeff said. "I was knocked
unconscious in Dallas, Rena was killed by a bus, both in places
we shouldn't have been. There's got to be some comprehensible
pattern in this."
 "I know," Laura said, more softly. "It's almost as if
there's something in the nature of things that doesn't want
people to time travel -- and punishes them when they do."
"You know I dreamed about Rena dead, shortly after I got
out of the Dallas hospital," Jeff said, recalling this for the
first time. "I wonder if that has any connection to any of
this."
"Well, remember you told me that Kip Thorpe--"
"Thorne," Jeff corrected.
"Right, Kip Thorne and his people hypothesized that people
flipped into alternate universes when they changed history
through time travel -- that that's how the loops opened by the
Thorne stayed clean -- so maybe, somehow, because you're here in
the past, you've caused an alternate universe to come into
being, and in that universe you'd already lived past knowing
about Rena's death, because that universe is progressing at a
different pace, and somehow your dream connected you to this
alternate version of your self..."
Jeff smiled. It was at times like this that he could
understand how he had come to feel so close to Laura. "You