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

of lives lost in the Challenger explosion -- if only he hadn't
been funneled back here to the 1960s... "Suppose you start at
the beginning," he said, "though it still bothers me to talk of
beginnings that in one sense haven't even happened yet."
"The gist is this," Laura said. "My team was -- will be --
situated about 15 years after yours in the future. We knew
about your team. Knew about you, Rena, her getting killed here.
When your team uncovered her death in a cache of old
micro-fiche, they stopped the project. Sealed all the files.
_My_ team found out about it and decided, secretly and
illegally, to re-open it. My job was to--"
"Don't tell me -- to stop the killing of JFK."
"No," Laura said.
"But you're here in the 1960s," Jeff said.
"My job was to keep an eye on you -- assuming I could find
you," Laura said.
Jeff's mouth hung open. "They sent you back here to find
_me_?"
"Actually, not back here -- to 1985," Laura said.
"But--"
"Right," Laura said. "But I wound up back here, just like
you, and just like Rena. My team didn't understand that at
first. Neither did I. But I think it's clear what's going on
now. The Thorne operates by creating basins of subatomic
attraction, at both ends of the artificial wormhole. But if you
create enough artificial basins, all in one place, that in
effect must begin to operate like one hugely powerful natural
basin, attracting all out-of-time units in its temporal
vicinity. Like a well worn ditch attracting rivulets of water."
"Three were intended to go back to 1985..." Jeff mused.
"Yes," Laura said, "and they all ended up here more than 20
years earlier. Think about it. Your team perfected time
travel, tried to bury it, my team dug it up -- you can't as a
society, a species, unlearn a kind of knowledge. There must be
thousands of time travel operations throughout the future. And
the likely place for many of them to focus is JFK -- first
assassination on film, on tape, copied onto digiscan, holoscan,
mirrorims, and who knows what new media. It's the cultural icon
of assassination, the beacon against which all others are
measured."
 "The glittering prize for time travellers," Jeff said,
bringing Laura her tea.
"Yes," Laura said, gratefully sipping.
"And pulling any other time travellers back here who
happened to be floating around nearby in time-flux," Jeff said.
Laura nodded. "Look at this very year. 1964. The
Beatles, Bob Dylan, Marshall McLuhan -- the sexual revolution,
feminism, the ecology movement all get big boosts in the next
few years. Why all of that packed into this one decade?
Couldn't be coincidence. The answer is that the 1960s were