"Sean McMullen - Voice of Steel" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

"Oh, and we all believe that, but things are not always what they seem. My colleague Doctor Cassin and
I have done a lot of work on the mathematics of temporal paradoxes and probability fields. We think it is
possible to have a past that ceases to exist, yet can be detected. A person, possibly in Tynedale's future,
helped him to change the future. In that future, she did not write all these pages, yet she still exists.
Possibly she is you. Yet the words have been written. How is that?"

"With permission, Madame Doctor, I cannot say."

"The question was merely rhetorical, commander. Were you able to give the answer, you would not be
the mere commander of a patrol cruiser. You would be the head ofтАФwell, the head of a very important
research facility. Getting back to the problem, however, we have hypothesised the idea of multiple pasts,
like tributaries of a river. One past will supersede another, but there will always be a single present.
These pages were possibly written in two or three alternative pasts that combined to make up our
present. The mathematicsтАФ"

"If you please, we should come to the point," interjected Dr. Cassin. "We have developed a
computational model to show that you can travel back in time, murder your father, and still exist. Much of
that model's mathematics is based on records found amid the ruins at Centaurus Skye."

We had found an entire civilization, cut down in its very prime. There had also been outposts and
colonies on nine of the other bodies in the Centaurus system. All had been destroyed with almost surgical
precision in some very ancient conflict. There was evidence that it had been a widespread, interplanetary
nuclear war, yet the ruins displayed very little evidence of radiation. Only a nuclear war millions of years
in the past would have allowed enough time for the radiation to have died away to such an extent. The
Centaurus Skye civilization had been considerably more advanced than ours. Our weapons technology
had always lagged our ability to build and power our spacecraft. The earliest of our space wars were
actually fought with gunpowder weapons.

"The Centaurians were destroyed by outsiders," Cassin continued. "Sooner or later we shall meet the
descendants of the victors, and when we do тАж"

She shrugged her shoulders, then turned to the war-master.

"Commander Watson, both the weapons and weapon designs found on that dead, defeated world were
centuries ahead of what we can build today, yet they were still annihilated," he explained. "Our war
laboratories have reverse engineered what your expedition brought back, yet even these are the weapons
of a defeated race, as well as being over a million years old. We have been thinking that if we can, ah,
engineer a different past, then we can be far more advanced in our weaponry by this year, 2004. We can
also warn those in our new future not to make the radio broadcasts that could alert the victorious race
about our presence."

"That is where you come in," said the baron.

"Your pardon, sir, but I do not follow," I confessed, almost reeling with the strangeness that was battering
me.

"Did you read the margin notes in the Tynedale Journal?"

"Ah, I only had time for the main text, sir."