"Ashley McConnell - Quantum Leap - Prelude" - читать интересную книгу автора (McConnell Ashley)

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I would like to thank Lisa Winters for providing the title of this book and awkward details, Linda
Young for reminding me of the meaning of the Vietnam Memorial to a hero who lost his brother in that
conflict, and Pathman Ed and Claire from GEnie's Medical RT for details about cell cultures. Special
thanks also go to Claudia DeGailler for invaluable and voluminous research on Navy retirement
ceremonies, Ginjer Buchanan for excellent suggestions and more awkward details, and Charlie Grant,
who traded the earthquake for gravity. Any mistakes that appear in this work are mine, not theirs.

Synchronicity happens: the August 1992 issue of Discover magazine featured an article about Masuo
Aizawa's work at the Tokyo Institute of Technology on combining nerve cells with electronics. My
conception of Ziggy as a neural "hybrid computer" predated this article by over a year, and Ziggy is, of
course, several generations beyond Aizawa's work, but it's funтАФand a bit disconcertingтАФto find yourself
writing science fiction when you thought it was fantasy.

Several fans have noted a discrepancy between the Quantum Leap books as I write them and the
series as it's presented on television, to wit: in the series, Sam's body Leaped, and the person he replaced
appears in the Waiting Room. In the books, Sam's mind Leaps and his body stays home, to be occupied
by the mind of the person he replaces. All I will say in defense of this is that in the first season of the
series, the distinction wasn't clear, and I made my choices based on the inherent dramatic opportunities
involved, and have remained consistent with them thereafter. It may help the determined purist to
consider the books an alternate-universe version of "Quantum Leap."

In that spirit, therefore, one might take Prelude to be the story, not of "how things happened," but one
version of how things might have been. . . .



SUMMER, 1990

Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime ...



He reads much; he is a great observer, and he looks

Quite through the deeds of men.

тАФWilliam Shakespeare Julius Caesar, I, ii, 200




CHAPTER
 ONE



The morning paper had announced that Iran blamed the United States for the recent earthquake. A
Navajo student attending the University of New Mexico had found a "New Gap to Bridge" that was, in