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

"Not to mention the London Orbital. Anyway, I should get out my laptop and handheld scanner. Are you
sure you have no problems with me copying the Tynedale Journal?"

"Copy all you like. Try to publish it, and you will find me on your doorstep waving the Copyright Act."

He left me with the journal, and I began to unpack my laptop and handheld scanner. The actual idea of
communicating with the past had an achingly strong allure. To save my life I could not estimate how many
times I had played through the fantasy of stepping into the streets of late fourteenth century London,
visiting the Tynedales' shop and introducing myself as a foreign student from some very distant land. I
would be dressed as a boy, and I would gain the confidence of William by my great scholarship. I would
suggest inventions to him, and convince him that all guns should be tested from behind a heavy safety
barrier. That would save the brothers in 1406, and they would go on to great and fantastic things.
Tynedale's theory of gravitation, Tynedale's laws of planetary motion, the Tynedale reflecting telescope,
and the Tynedale methods of differential and integral calculus. It was at this point that the fantasies always
broke down. I would reveal myself to be a girl, and William would fall in love with me. Then what? Live
as wife in the fifteenth century, where I would not fit? Bring William to the twenty-first century, where he
would face a lifetime of being a curiosity at the very best? What else could there be?

In a way it was better to leave my fantasies as fantasies тАж yet it would be such a fine and splendid thing
to save the brilliant Tynedale Brothers from their sad and untimely death in 1406. Still, nothing could go
back in time, and the past was as dead as the Tynedales. I taught this sort of thing to my classes of
teenagers year after year. Nothing could go faster than light, nothing could go backwards in time.
Suddenly I paused, hands poised above the keys of the laptop. Entangled particles. The memory of an
article in some science journal stirred somewhere on the edge of my awareness. An experiment had been
conducted, and entangled particles had been shown to communicate faster than the speed of light.
Several orders of magnitude faster than light. If the lightspeed barrier was nothing of the sort, perhaps
there was hope for travel into the past. Even communication with the past would be enough to save the
Tynedales.

Entanglement. The word had a new, exotic feel to it, full of potential. Might objects be entangled in time
as well as space? I stared at the words on the screen, then checked back at the original page.

Marry hat er litel lamb
Hir father short y dead
And now she takes hir lamb tisk oorl
Bitweane two bittes off bret

The style certainly did not belong to the early fifteenth century. No more than the London Orbital or
supermarkets. I had recited those very words to test the Don Alverin sword as a radio receiver. They
had been written as a fifteenth-century listener might have heard modern wordsтАФespecially quickly
spoken, ill-perceived modern words. Had they existed on the page a few minutes ago? Now I
remembered using them because they were on the page, but тАж my head began to spin.

William Tynedale had heard my words, and had written them down in 1404. Some veterans of the Battle
of Poitiers would have been alive, Joan of Arc had not yet been born. William Tynedale had heard my
words! Without another thought I pressed the transmission key of the radio transceiver. I knew the
English of the Tynedales reasonably well, so although I spoke in a contemporary style, I tried to speak
slowly and to phrase and pronounce everything with an early fifteenth-century audience in mind.

"William Tynedale of London, I am speaking from six hundred years in your future. It is very hard to