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

he ought to return as soon as possible to 2084, so he could try
this again, and with any luck arrive at least a few months
before January 28, 1986. To do that, he had to go back now to
the lounge in the NYU Student Building from which he'd emerged,
the exact same place, that was the way the Thorne worked.
But something in Jeff rebelled against this logic --
something in his nature which said, look, you've gotten this
far, it's not good, but you may never get this far again, so you
better take what you can of this chance to save the space
program...
But how?
He'd have to improvise.
He thought about the endless careful plans his team had
made for him to avoid getting caught up in some paradox -- keep
the loop clean, don't do anything in the past that might
undermine the very foundation of this project. Steer clear of
everyone's great-grandparents... Jeez, how the hell was he
supposed to do that back here, 23 years earlier than he'd
planned to arrive, when he had no idea where everyone he was
supposed to avoid was?
Jeff rubbed his head. Every second that he stayed here was
a knife at the throat of his future. He was off the screen, way
out of equation-range -- a single word to a wrong person, some
land-mine of the past, could set in motion a chain of events
that erased his colleagues, maybe even him, from existence.
True, he had no close family, no one that he really loved deeply
anymore -- well, maybe still Rena, in a way -- but he certainly
hadn't undertaken this job to kill his friends, make himself a
martyr to a reconstituted future that might never know he'd
existed in the first place.
 On the other hand, how really likely was it that he'd run
into such a land-mine? Painstaking tests had shown that the
effects of most interjections in the past were sooner or later
washed out in the myriad of everything else that remained the
same. And how could anyone from his vantage point truly know
what was intended all along? Maybe he'd always been supposed to
arrive here back in 1963 -- maybe he was ordained to help the
space program, or humanity, in some way other than stopping the
Challenger. Maybe that's why the Challenger blew up after all,
because there was no way he could influence events this far back
to stop the explosion that took the heart and soul out of the
space program, had set up the 21st century to be little more
than an age of commentary looking back on the Golden Age. His
head spun. He could feel the sweet buzzing vortex of paradox
whispering in his brain, drawing him in... No, I have free will,
I'll do what I damn well choose, I don't have time for paradox
now, I only have time to act.
He looked at the clock on the wall. Twelve minutes after
twelve. Too much lead time for the Challenger -- the shuttle
had barely been conceived of in 1963. He supposed he could live