"Robert Charles Wilson - Divided by Infinity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

I answered the phone.
It was Deirdre. тАЬHeтАЩs dead,тАЭ she told me. тАЬZiegler. I thought
you should know.тАЭ
I said, тАЬIтАЩm sorry.тАЭ
тАЬIтАЩm taking care of the arrangements. He was so aloneтАж no
family, no friends, just nothing.тАЭ
тАЬWill there be a service?тАЭ
 тАЬHe wanted to be cremated. YouтАЩre welcome to come. It
might be nice if somebody besides me showed up.тАЭ
тАЬI will. What about the store?тАЭ
тАЬThatтАЩs the crazy part. According to the bank, he left it to me.тАЭ
Her voice was choked with emotion. тАЬCan you imagine that? I
never even called him by his first name! To be honestтАФoh, God, I
didnтАЩt even like him! Now he leaves me this tumbledown business
of his!тАЭ
I told her IтАЩd see her at the mortuary.


I paid no attention to the news that night, save to register the
lead stories, which were ominous and strange.
We live, Ziegler had said, in the science fiction of our youth.
The тАЬET signalsтАЭ NASA scientists had discovered were, it
turned out, a simple star map, at the center of which wasтАФnot the
putative aliensтАЩ home worldтАФbut a previously undiscovered binary
neutron star in the constellation Orion.
The message, one astronomer speculated, might be a warning.
Neutron-star pairs are unstable. When they eventually collide,
drawn together by their enormous gravity, the collision produces a
black holeтАФand in the process a burst of gamma rays and cosmic
radiation, strong enough to scour the Earth of life if the event
occurs within some two or three thousand light-years of us.
The freshly discovered neutron stars were well within that
range. As for the collision, it might happen in ten years, a thousand,
ten thousandтАФnone of the quoted authorities would commit to a
date, though estimates had been shrinking daily.
Nice of our neighbors to warn us, I thought.
But how long had that warning bell been ringing, and for how
many centuries had we ignored it?
 DeirdreтАЩs description of the Soziere book as a тАЬbubble
theoryтАЭ haunted me.
No proof, no evidence could exist: that was ruled out by the
theory itselfтАФor at least, as Ziegler had implied, there would be no
evidence one could share.
But there had been evidence, at least in my case: the paperback
books, тАЬanomalousтАЭ books imported, presumably, from some
other timeline, a history I had since lost to cardiac arrest, a car
accident, clonazepam.
But the books were gone.
I had traded them, in effect, for You Will Never Die.
Which I had returned to Oscar Ziegler.