"Oltion-BeforeChristmas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

when the day of judgment failed to arrive, even full-scale wars between nations
had apparently been fought to find out what concessions to make at the
bargaining table before hostilities began for real. Mike suspected he had
volunteered to fight in at least one such war, and though he had no evidence to
prove it, the thrill of knowing he would have done it was still his.

But not Sarah's. If she hadn't really done something it didn't matter to her,
and hence she didn't waste her time -- even imaginary time -- on things that
wouldn't remain real.

It was possible to loop around and not create paradoxes, but to do that you had
to make sure you didn't meet yourself or change anything you or anyone else
would have done, and unfortunately this wasn't one of those situations.

"Poor baby," Sarah said. She kissed him on the cheek before she turned away
toward the bedroom again to get dressed. "Don't forget your umbrella," she
reminded him as she walked down the hallway. "It's going to rain this
afternoon." Her implication was clear; she didn't want him backspacing for
something that trivial.

He looked out the window at the city skyline beyond, and felt a brief impulse to
pick up the phone and throw it right through the glass. That would be reason
enough to backspace, he supposed, but he knew what happened to people who gave
in to every impulse that came a long. Backspacing was cheap, but it wasn't free;
eventually the poor buggers had to accept whatever life they wound up with and
damn their rotten luck. No, Sarah was perhaps overcautious, but she did have a
point.

THERE WERE THREE murders on the subway, and a bombing that took out half the
station just as Mike's train pulled in. The murderers were simply edited out
before they got on the train, but in order to keep as much evidence as possible
the police apprehended the bomber only moments before he set off the explosive,
so Mike got to watch them lead him away in handcuffs. He was a normal-enough
looking high-school kid, maybe early college age, dressed in a Santa suit to
hide the dynamite taped to his waist, and he was grinning as he explained to the
police how he'd built the detonator from paperclips and an old chemical battery.
"I just wanted to see if it'd work," he told them. "I guess it must have, huh?"

"Must have," one of the cops said. He wore the puzzled look of someone trying to
see through a paradox, but he finally just shrugged and said, "I don't usually
get wild hunches like the one that made me check you for explosives without a
pretty good reason."

The kid nodded, a slow frown replacing his own grin. "Why didn't you go back and
stop me from building it?" he asked.

"Got to have a deterrent," another cop said. "You could have killed people.
Probably did. If we let everybody do that whenever they wanted without fining
them, we'd be so busy backspacing we'd never get past this afternoon."