"Tom Purdom-The Redemption of August" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

made the journey -- every sentence he had uttered had proved it! -- because he came from a society in
which von Kluck had followed his natural instincts, the Schlieffen Plan had failed, and France had
eventually struggled through to victory! I had lived my entire life in a world in which the source of every
calamity had been a conspirator who had arrogantly altered the natural course of history.
***


The maid was working in Greenway's room when I got back to the hotel. I had to hide in my own
room until she finished. I knew I had found the radio when I dug through the things in Greenway's trunk
and found a metal box in the bottom right hand corner. When I tried to pull the box out of the trunk,
however, I discovered it had been welded to the bottom. I searched desperately for the lock and cursed
when I realized the meaning of the four brass disks on the left side of the box. The disks appeared to be
buttons, but they were actually an electronic device. Greenway had secured the box with an electronic
combination lock disguised as a mechanical contrivance.
Once again I managed to control my infamous impetuosity. I checked the corridor before I left the
room. I walked calmly and carefully through the hotel caf├й and maintained my pace and demeanor as I
proceeded from the hotel to a store only a hundred meters away. I purchased a sturdy long-handled ax
and had it neatly wrapped before I carried it back to his room and locked the door behind me.
This time it was I who found myself facing a gun. There had been another knife, it seemed -- a folding
knife which wasn't mentioned in Madame Lescaut's account. He bad cut himself free and managed to
beg a ride on a passing truck.
I was confident he wouldn't shoot me. He was obviously not interested in any action that might attract
serious notice. I put down the ax when he told me to and once again had to listen while he ranted at me.
I had been assuming he was a German agent who had been transported to the past by German
conspirators who were trying to rectify the mistakes of their generals. Now it occurred to me he might
actually be a megalomaniac who believed he could singlehandedly legislate the destiny of the entire human
race. According to him, the entire twentieth century had been a series of unmitigated disasters -- and
every nightmare in his catalogue had taken place merely because the German barbarians had failed in
their attempt to conquer France. In the future he came from, the Schlieffen Plan had indeed failed
because von Kluck had modified his original orders. The war, he claimed, had turned into a "stalemate" in
which millions of men had died in frontal attacks against fixed positions that stretched across the entire
map of Europe. After that there had been a second war which had been even worse than the first. There
had been massacres and revolutions, and eventually -- as a direct result of the failure of the Schlieffen
Plan and the outbreak of the second German attempt to conquer Europe -- the development of
"superbombs" that could destroy entire cities. He was here, I was to believe, because the entire human
race would be wiped out if he didn't make sure Kaiser Wilhelm's hoodlums became the masters of
Europe.
Even if he was a German agent, he was giving me many reasons to think he was not a trained
professional agent. He talked like many of the scientists and scholars I had known. He was a slight,
somewhat bony man with a protruding stomach. He was holding his gun as if it were a harmless piece of
pipe.
"What did you do in your own time?" I asked.
He looked startled -- as if he couldn't understand why I would ask a personal question -- and then
told me he was a physicist. At some place near London, he maintained. He had worked with collision
accelerators -- a concept I was familiar with -- and experimented with some elementary particles I had
never heard of called "quarks." He had worked out the whole concept of time travel all by himself, he
asserted, and embarked on his journey through time entirely on his own, in total secrecy, because he felt
it was his duty to save the world from the horrors that would befall it if the Schlieffen Plan failed. He had
always been interested in history, he claimed (an odd enthusiasm. for a physicist), and he had conceived
his whole mad scheme merely because he had always felt von Kluck's decision to modify the Schlieffen