"Ian Watson - Slow Birds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

A boy stood there. With red hair, and freckles.
For a moment Jason did not recognize the boy. But then he saw that it
was Daniel. Daniel, unchanged. Or maybe grown up a little. Maybe a year
older.
"Dan . . . ?"
The boy surveyed Jason bemusedly: his balding crown, his sagging
girth, his now spindly legs, and the heavy stick with a stylized bird's head
on which he leaned, gripping it with a liver-spotted hand.
"Jay," he said after a moment, "I've come back."
"Back? But . . . ."
"I know what the birds are now! They are weapons. Missiles. Tens and
hundreds of thousands of them. There's a war going on. But it's like a
game as well: a board game run by machines. Machines that think. It's
only been going on for a few days in their time. The missiles shunt to and
fro through time to get to their destination. But they can't shunt in the
time of that world, because of cause and effect. So here's where they do
their shunting. In our world. The other possibility-world."
"This is nonsense. I won't listen."
"But you must, Jay! It can be stopped for us before it's too late. I know
how. Both sides can interfere with each other's missiles and explode them
out of sightтАФthat's hereтАФif they can find them fast enough. But the war
over there's completely out of control. There's a winning pattern to it, but
this only matters to the machines any longer, and they're buried away
underground. They build the birds at a huge rate with material from the
Earth's crust, and launch them into other-time automatically."
"Stop it, Dan."
"I fell off the bird over thereтАФbut I fell into a lake, so I wasn't killed, only
hurt. There are still some pockets of land left, around the Bases. They
patched me up, the people there. They're finished, in another few hours of
their timeтАФthough it's dozens of years to us. I brought them great hope,
because it meant that all life isn't finished. Just theirs. Life can go on.
What we have to do is build a machine that will stop their machines
finding the slow birds over here. By making interference in the air. There
are waves. Like waves of light, but you can't see them."
"You're raving."
"Then the birds will still shunt here. But harmlessly. Without glassing
us. And in a hundred years time, or a few hundred, they'll even stop
coming at all, because the winning pattern will be all worked out by then.
One of the war machines will give up, because it lost the game. Oh, I know
it ought to be able to give up right now! But there's an element of the
irrational programmed into the machines' brains too, so they don't give
up too soon. When they do, everyone will be long dead there on landтАФand
some surviving people think the war machines will start glassing the ocean
floor as a final strategy before they're through. But we can build an
air-wave-maker. They've locked the knowledge in my brain. It'll take us a
few years to mine the right metals and tool up and provide a power source
. . ."
Young Daniel ran out of breath briefly. He gasped. "They had a
prototype slow bird. They sat me on it and sent me into other-time again.
They managed to guide it. It emerged just ten miles from here. So I