"H. Beam Piper - Police Operation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

and most of that in the past forty years. Of course, the life-expectancy on that level is only about seventy
years."

"Humph! I'm seventy-eight, last birthday," the boyish-looking pilot snorted. "Their medical science must
be mostly witchcraft!"

"Until quite recently, it was," Verkan Vall agreed. "Same story there as in everything elseтАФrapid
advancement in the past few decades, after thousands of years of cultural inertia."

"You know, sir, I don't really understand this paratime stuff," the pilot confessed. "I know that all time is
totally present, and that every moment has its own past-future line of event-sequence, and that all events
in space-time occur according to maximum probability, but I just don't get this alternate probability stuff,
at all. If something exists, it's because it's the maximum-probability effect of prior causes; why does
anything else exist on any other time-line?"

Verkan Vall blew smoke at the air-renovator. A lecture on paratime theory would nicely fill in the
three-hour interval until the landing at Dhergabar. At least, this kid was asking intelligent questions.

"Well, you know the principal of time-passage, I suppose?" he began.

"Yes, of course; Rhogom's Doctrine. The basis of most of our psychical science. We exist perpetually at
all moments within our life-span; our extraphysical ego component passes from the ego existing at one
moment to the ego existing at the next. During unconsciousness, the EPC is 'time-free'; it may detach, and
connect at some other moment, with the ego existing at that time-point. That's how we precog. We take
an autohypno and recover memories brought back from the future moment and buried in the
subconscious mind."

"That's right," Verkan Vall told him. "And even without the autohypno, a lot of precognitive matter leaks
out of the subconscious and into the conscious mind, usually in distorted forms, or else inspires
'instinctive' acts, the motivation for which is not brought to the level of consciousness. For instance,
suppose, you're walking along North Promenade, in Dhergabar, and you come to the Martian Palace
Caf├й, and you go in for a drink, and meet same girl, and strike up an acquaintance with her. This chance
acquaintance develops into a love affair, and a year later, out of jealousy, she rays you half a dozen times
with a needler."

"Just about that happened to a friend of mine, not long ago," the pilot said. "Go on, sir."

"Well, in the microsecond or so before you dieтАФor afterward, for that matter, because we know that the
extraphysical component survives physical destructionтАФyour EPC slips back a couple of years, and
re-connects at some point pastward of your first meeting with this girl, and carries with it memories of
everything up to the moment of detachment, all of which are indelibly recorded in your subconscious [Pg
11] mind. So, when you re-experience the event of standing outside the Martian Palace with a thirst, you
go on to the Starway, or Nhergal's, or some other bar. In both cases, on both time-lines, you follow the
line of maximum probability; in the second case, your subconscious future memories are an added causal
factor."

"And when I back-slip, after I've been needled, I generate a new time-line? Is that it?"

Verkan Vall made a small sound of impatience. "No such thing!" he exclaimed. "It's semantically
inadmissible to talk about the total presence of time with one breath and about generating new time-lines