"Anderson, Poul - There Will Be Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

His tone grew reminiscent: "We had some fine excursions later. Uncle Jack was the ideal guide and mentor. I'd no reason to disobey his commands about secrecy, aside from some disguised bragging to my friend Pete. Uncle Jack led me to better things than I'd ever have discovered for myself."
"You did hop around on your own," I reminded him.
"Occasionally. Like when a couple of buffies attacked me. I doubled back several times and outnumbered them."
"No wonder you showed such a growth rate. . . . When you learned your father was going into the service, you hoped to assure yourself he'd return safe, right?"
Jack Havig winced. "Yes. I headed futureward and took quick peeks at intervals. Until I looked in the window and saw Mother crying. Then I went pastward tifi I found a chance to read that telegram-oh, God. I didn't travel in time again for years. I didn't think I'd ever want to."
The silence of the snow lapped about us.
At length I asked: "When did you most recently meet this mentor?"
"In 1969. But the previous time had been. . . shortly before I took off and learned about my father. Uncle Jack was particularly good to me, then. We went to the old and truly kind of circus, sometime in the late nineteenth century. I wondered why he seemed so sad, and why he reexplained in such detail the necessity of keeping our secret. Now I know."
"Do you know who he is?"
His mouth lifted on the left side only. "Who do you suppose?"

"I resumed time traveling last year," he said after a while. "I had to have a refuge from that, that situation on the farm. They were jaunts into the past, at first. You've no idea how beautiful this country was before the settlers arrived. And the Indians-well, I have friends among them. I haven't acquired more than a few words of their language, but they welcome me and, uh, the girls are always ready, able, and eager."
I could not but laugh. "Sven the Younger makes a lot of your having no dates!"
He grinned back. "You can guess how those trips relieved me." Serious again: "But you can guess, too, how more and more the whole thing at home-what Birkelund is pleased to call my home-got to feel silly, futile, and stuffing. Even the outside world. Like, what the devil was I doing in high school?
There I was, full-grown, full of these marvels I'd seen, hearing teen-agers giggle and teachers drone!"
"I imagine the family flareup was what sent you into the future?"
"Right. I was half out of my mind with rage. Mainly I hoped to see Sven Birkelund's tombstone. Twenty years forward seemed like a good round number. But knowing I'd have a lot to catch up on, I made for late 1969, so as to be prepared to get the most out of 1970. . . . The house was still in existence. Is. Will be."
"Sven?" I asked softly.
"I suppose he'll have survived." His tone was savage. "I don't care enough to check on that. In two more years, my mother will divorce him."
"And-?"
"She'll take the babies, both of them, back to Massachusetts. Her third marriage wifi be good. I mustn't add to her worries in this time, though. That's why I retumed~ I made my absence a month long to show Birkelund I thedn business; but I couldn't make it longer than that, I couldn't do it to her."
I saw in him what I have seen in others, when those they care about are sick or dying. So I was hasty to say: "You told me you met your Uncle Jack, your other self."
"Yeah." He was glad to continue with practicalities. "He was waiting when I appeared in 1969. That was out in the woodlot, at night-I didn't want to risk a stray spectator-but the lot had been logged off and planted in corn. He'd taken a double room in the hotel-that is, the one they'll build after the Senlac Arms is razed-and put me up for a few days. He told me about my mother, and encouraged me to verify it by newspaper files in the library, plus showing me a couple of letters she'd recently written to him . . . to me. Afterward he gave me a thousand dollars-Doc, the prices in twenty years!-and he suggested I look around the country.
"News magazines indicated Berkeley was where it was at- uh, a future idiom. Anyway, San Francisco's right across the Bay and I'd always wanted to see it."
"How was Berkeley?" I asked, remembering visits to a staid university town.
He told me, as well as lie was able. But no words, in 1951, could have conveyed what I have since experienced, that wild, eerie, hilarious, terrifying, grotesque, mind-bending assault upon every sense and common sense which is Telegraph Avenue at the close of the seventh decade of the twentieth century.
"Didn't you risk trouble with the police?" I inquired.
"No. I stopped off in 1966 and registered under a fake name for the draft, which gave me a card saying I was twenty-one in 1969. . . . The Street People hooked me. I came to them, an old-fashioned bumpkin, heard their version of what'd been going on, and nobody else's. For months I was among the radicals. Hand-to-mouth odd-job existence, demonstrations, pot, dirty pad, unbathed girls, the works."
"Your writing here doesn't seem favorable to that," I observed.
"No. I'm sure Uncle Jack wanted me to have an inside knowledge, how it feels to be somebody who's foresworn the civilization that bred him. But I changed."
"M-m-m, I'd say you rebounded. Way out into right field. But go on. What happened?"
"I took a trip to the further future."
"And?"
"Doc," he said most quietly, "consider yourself fortunate. You're already getting old."
"I'll be dead, then?" My heart stumbled.
"By the time of the blowup and breakdown, no doubt. I haven't checked, except I did establish you're alive and healthy in 1970." I wondered why he did not smile, as he should have done when giving me good news. Today I know; he said nothing about Kate.
"The war-the war-and its consequences come later," he went on in the same iron voice. "But everything follows straight from that witches' sabbath I saw part of in Berkeley."
He sighed and rubbed his tired eyes. "I returned to 1970 with some notion of stemming the tide. There were a few people around, even young people, who could see a little reality. This
broadside . . . they helped me publish and distribute it, thinking me a stray Republican."
"Were you?"
"Lord, no. You. don't imagine any political party has been any use whatsoever for the past three or four generations, do you? They'll get worse."
He had emptied his glass anew, but declined my offer of more. "I'd better keep a clear head, Doc. We do have to work out a cover yarn. I know we will, because my not-so-much-older self gave me to understand I'd handle my present troubles all right. However, it doesn't let us off going through the motions."
"Time is unchangeable?" I wondered. "We-our lives-are caught and held in the continuum-like ifies in amber?"
"I don't know, I don't know," he groaned. "I do know that my efforts were wasted. My former associates called me a fink, my new friends were an insignificant minority, and, hell, we could hardly give away our literature."
"You mustn't expect miracles in politics," I said. "Beware of the man who promises them."
"True. I realized as much, after the shock of what I'd seen uptime had faded a bit. in fact, I decided my duty was to come back and stand by my mother. At least this way I can make the world a tiny bit less horrible."
His tone softened: "No doubt I was foolish to keep a copy of my flyer. But the dearest girl helped me put it together. .
Well. In a way, I've lucked out. Now one other human being shares my life. I've barely started to feel how lonely I was."
"You are absolutely unique?" I whispered.
"I don't know. I'd guess not. They're doubtless very rare, but surely more time travelers than me exist. How can I find them?" he cried. "And if we should join together, what can we do?"