"Paul Park - The Tourist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

The Tourist - a short story by Paul Park



The Tourist
a short story by Paul Park
Everybody wants to see the future, but of course they can't. They get
turned back at the border. "Go away," the customs people tell them.
"You
can't come in. Go home." Often you'll get people on TV who say they
snuck
across. Some claim it's wonderful and some claim it's a nightmare, so
in
that way it's like before there was time travel at all.
But the past is different. I would have liked to have gone early, when
it
was first opened up. Nowadays whenever you go, you're liable to be
caught
in the same pan-cultural snarl: We just can't keep our hands off, and as
a
result, Cuba has invaded prehistoric Texas, the Empire of Ashok has
become
a Chinese client state, and Napoleon is in some kind of indirect
communication with Genghis Khan. They plan to attack Russia in some
vast
temporal pincer movement. In the meantime, Burger Chef has opened
restaurants in Edo, Samarkand and Thebes, and a friend of mine who
ventured by mistake into the Thirty Years War, where you'd think no one
in
their right mind would ever want to go, said that even Dessau in 1626
was
full of fat Australians drinking boilermakers and complaining that the
17th century just wasn't the same since Carnage Travel ("Explore the
bloodsoaked fields of Europe!") organized its packaged tours. They
weren't
even going to show up at the bridgehead the next day; my friend went,
and
reported that the Danish forces were practically outnumbered by
Japanese
tourists, who stampeded the horses with their fleets of buses, and
would
have changed the course of history had there been anything left to
change.
Wallenstein, the Imperial commander, didn't even bother to show up till
four o'clock; he was dead drunk in the back of a Range Rover, and it
was
only due to contractual obligations that he appeared at all, the
Hapsburg
government (in collaboration with a New York public relations firm)
having