"Andrew J. Offutt - Gone With the Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

Ben tried, but this time he came back crestfallen. The VW wouldn't go past tomorrow. So then he
went back to yesterday. That worked out, and he came back just fine.
 But he couldn't make the day after tomorrow. Or next week or next year; nothing past tomorrow.
Don't bother asking why. You can play with that sort of thing, theorizing, all day and into the middle
of next month. Yesterday is there to visit, because it was there, remember? So we can go back to it.
Tomorrow? I don't know. Maybe it follows naturally out of today. But the day after tomorrow just isn't
there yet. It hasn't happened. Maybe it can be changed, which is why we can't go there (then). Because
it is subject to change, and thus doesn't exist yet.
Buy it; you like the concept of freedom of choice, don't you? Would it be there if we could visit the
future?
"Well," I said, a little dry in the mouth, "there went a lot of marvy get-rich-quick ideas! OK Ben, it's
time to find out, right?"
Ben and I stood there in the middle of that field of slightly-waving timothy, looking at each other. He
blinked those pale, watery eyes, stared another couple of seconds into mine, and turned away. He
waded through the timothy, and mounted the truck, and got into the VW. Then he and that strange VW
wagon went away: Bang!
I squatted down and gazed at my wallet while I waited.
That was the explanation for the unfortunate, precipitate, and lamented demise of the south and east
walls of poor old ivied Smoire
Hall, I mused. The bang. Thunder. Suddenly there's a VW-sized hole in the air, and the air rushes in
to fill it. Bang! He had thought of that, and that's why we were way the hell out in the middle of this field.
Shaking up birds with bang after bang.
Then Dr. Corrick returned, obviously able to return to the same moment at which he'd left if he really
wanted to, fine-tuning. He bore five comic books. Five, no less. All newsstand fresh, all identical: the
June, 1938 edition of Action Comics.
Chortling, he explained. "I thought I might as well bring some worthwhile proof," he told me
triumphantly. "This is the origin of Superman issue! Each is worth a thousand dollars or more, in mint
condition. And believe me, HarveyтАФthese are in mint condition!"
The sound I made is what is known as a Comanche yell.

A few more little experiments taught us a few more little things. For one, there's a weight-loss, a nigh
weightless factor in trans-time movement. Let's don't go into too many details, but Ben and I learned that
the VW could transport enormous weights, so long as it was timejumping.
(Time-travel, Ben had postulated and now proven, is inextricably bound up with e and e=mc2. That
led me to point out that since we got it all together out in the middle of a field, we had proven the Corrick
Unified Field Theorem.)
He did have a hard time selling those comic books, by the way. They were so perfect, so new, that
dealers were decidedly wary. But he sold four of them at lastтАФkeeping one because he just couldn't
"bear to part with it"тАФto some hotshot dealers out Dallas way. Some people kept insisting that those
guys had been taken, and there was a lot of chatter in the dealers' magazines for awhile, about the Dallas
con.
We let a hyper-excited Mark Ventnor know what we'd done, and he came down to Chinchilla to
see, and then to try out the temporal traverser (which Ben and I by now referred to simply as "the
veedub").
Mark came back from his fourth jaunt into the very distant past very shaken indeed. He had visited a
consummately ancient gent named Abram, the same who later changed his name to Abraham. Much
impressed, he indicated to his visitor that he was invited to dinner.
"Mutton?" Ben asked.
Mark nodded, frowning, unable to speak.
"Wow," I muttered.