"Chalker, Jack L - G.O.D. Inc 3 - The Maze in the Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

out, and even ones where some of them evolved into intelligent life. Germany won
or lost, America did or didn't break free of England, England and parts of
Europe stayed Catholic, or the Moslems overran Rome and kept going all the way.
Worlds in which a Roman-ruled South America battled a Chinese-settled North
America.
One world had discovered this parallelism, and that world had created a means of
moving between it called for good reason The Labyrinth. A sort of railroad
complete with branches and switchers and dispatchers that stretched for a
million worlds in both directions and still didn't reach them all. They alone
could move between and they alone controlled the dual lines, one for passengers,
one for freight.
And one world's bright ideas were another world's-well, junk. They ran at
different speeds sometimes, and things invented one place were never invented
the next. Whether one world needed the Dicing Wizard or not was irrelevant;
G.O.D., Inc. made sure you wanted it anyway, at least in enough quantities to
make the transshipment worthwhile. She often wondered what her world sent the
others.
And James Bond is now lying in the guest bedroom.
Well, why not? She and Sam had once faced down a very villainous Lament
Cranston. Sometimes the names just popped up elsewhere and elsewhen; sometimes a
totally fictional character in one place might pop up as a very real and quite
similar person in another. She'd heard a lot of theories that writers were just
folks sensitized, somehow, to certain people or things in the other worlds.
There were even other versions of you in those other worlds. That was the freaky
part. The Company had a way of telling one from the other but nobody else could.
A tiny little implant, a transmitter, deep in the bone someplace that gave you a
unique signature and also both authorized you in the Labyrinth and made a record
as you passed each switch point or station so they could track you. Of course,
it could be beaten, and had been. They were now sure that their new system was
foolproof, but she knew as well as Sam that any system declared foolproof was
impervious only to fools; smart folks could always figure a way to beat it.
She had checked on the other versions of her in worlds near her own, and even
met and shared some time with one of her counterparts, but they were pretty
depressing overall. Whores and welfare babymakers mostly, low class and lower
lives. The ones who survived the streets and weren't in jail or something. She'd
been the exception, the lucky one, to whom the fluke good thing had happened.
She didn't need to reflect much to realize just how lucky, and improbable, that
one thing was.
Sam. Sam Horowitz, former cop, former private eye, now Company Security
Specialist A cute little guy who was culturally as Jewish as they came and
looked the part but who thought he was Nick Charles or Sam Spade or at least
William Powell. A guy who'd given up everything and married a black girl from
Camden who was a high school dropout, chubby, and who thought of herself as more
street smart than real smart, but who had also been infused with the dreams of
glamour of the detective business by a fanatical father who was an ex-Army cop
turned failed private eye himself and who'd wound up floating in the Schuykill
River when he'd gotten his first really big case.
The real amazing thing was that there were a lot fewer Sams than Brandys in
those other worlds. He'd been involved in a lot of dangerous stuff as an Air
Force cop and apparently he'd been killed in most of them, or before. The