"H. Beam Piper - Crossroads of Destiny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

The waiter arrived at this point, and the sandy-haired man ordered another rye highball. I decided to
have another bourbon on the rocks, and the TV impresario said, "Gin-and-tonic," absently, and went into
a reverie which lasted until the drinks arrived. Then he came awake again.

"I see what you mean," he said. "Most of the audience would wonder what difference it would have
made where Columbus would have gotten his ships, as long as he got them and America got discovered.
I can see it would have made a hell of a big difference. But how could it be handled any other way? How
could you figure out just what the difference would have been?"

"Well, you need a man who'd know the historical background, and you'd need a man with a powerful
creative imagination, who is used to using it inside rigorously defined limits. Don't try to get them both in
one; a collaboration would really be better. Then you work from the known situation in Europe and in
America in 1492, and decide on the immediate effects. And from that, you have to carry it along, step by
step, down to the present. It would be a lot of hard and very exacting work, but the result would be
worth it." He took a sip from his glass and added: "Remember, you don't have to prove that the world
today would be the way you set it up. All you have to do is make sure that nobody else would be able to
prove that it wouldn't."

"Well, how could you present that?"

"As a play, with fictional characters and a plot; time, the present, under the changed conditions. The
plotтАФthe reason the coward conquers his fear and becomes a hero, the obstacle to the boy marrying the
girl, the reason the innocent man is being persecutedтАФwill have to grow out of this imaginary world
you've constructed, and be impossible in our real world. As long as you stick to that, you're all right."

"Sure. I get that." The plump man was excited again; he was about half sold on the idea. "But how will
we get the audience to accept it? We're asking them to start with an assumption they know isn't true."

"Maybe it is, in another time-dimension," the colonel suggested. "You can't prove it isn't. For that matter,
you can't prove there aren't other time-dimensions."
"Hah, that's it!" the sandy-haired man exclaimed. "World of alternate probability. That takes care of that."

He drank about a third of his highball and sat gazing into the rest of it, in an almost yogic trance. The
plump man looked at the colonel in bafflement.

"Maybe this alternate-probability time-dimension stuff means something to you," he said. "Be damned if it
does to me."

"Well, as far as we know, we live in a four-dimensional universe," the colonel started.

The elderly man across from him groaned. "Fourth dimension! Good God, are we going to talk about
that?"

"It isn't anything to be scared of. You carry an instrument for measuring in the fourth dimension all the
time. A watch."

"You mean it's just time? But that isn'tтАФ"

"We know of three dimensions of space," the colonel told him, gesturing to indicate them. "We can use
them for coordinates to locate things, but we also locate things in time. I wouldn't like to ride on a train or