"John Dalmas - The Helverti Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

difference will not maintain itself against the tendency toward the
conservation of established universes. The separation does not
perpetuate, and only one of the two alternatives continues.
But if the changes are potent enough, "parallel" universes result, or
"divergent" universes, if you prefer. (We deal in metaphor here.) Neither
universe has any material trace of the other. However, the causal complex
persists for a considerable period as shadow events. Thus adepts, by
focusing on the divergence zone, can discern and penetrate the event
cloud. And with sufficient knowledge of pre-event conditions, can give
those perceptions context, and to a degree, identity. In fact, it is by
recording the deep-questioning of adepts that the following reconstruction
has been assembled.
***
In year 1983 of the Terran Common Era, in what we can call the stem
universe, a sequence of political events and posturing led to an American
naval task force holding exercises in the vicinity of Korea. Within weeks,
the government of the Soviet Union replied with a large-scale
demonstration of naval power within five hundred miles of the Hawaiian
Islands.
Given the experience of 1941, the American Pacific Fleet was sent out to
confront it: a response sufficiently threatening, it was misread as an
impending attack. Ordered by Soviet Pacific Fleet Command, the Soviet
force commander ordered a single tactical nuclear missile launched to
destroy the American flagship. However, the order was incorrectly
transmitted, and all his missile ships fired.
The Soviet admiral, appalled by the error, immediately notified Moscow. At
the same time, an American satellite monitoring the confrontation reported
this multi-missile launch, and the U.S. responded immediately with a
launch not only against the Soviet task force, but against naval shore
targets in the Soviet Far East.
The Soviet chief executive, Yuri V. Andropov, had acted almost as quickly.
Assuming the Americans would launch a wider-ranging nuclear response
than they actually did, he ordered an ICBM attack on numerous strategic
American targets. This massive launch was reported promptly, and the
Americans raised the ante "while they still could."
The critical mistransmission of the Soviet admiral's firing order resulted
from a choice made by the admiral's signalman-to covertly drink ethanol
on watch. It was the kind of choice made innumerable times at every
moment in every universe, but this one occurred at a time and place of
extreme pregnancy. The result was a space-time bifurcation, and two
resultant universes. In one, the drink was taken, in the other it wasn't.
In each, choices made during the next few minutes created a veritable
spray of incipient new universes. This seems to be characteristic in the
violent decline of sapient life forms. In the universe of interest here, which
we will call Universe Terra One, hundreds of fusion warheads exploded in
the atmosphere and on the surface. The possibility of such a war had
been foreseen. Scientists had predicted not only extensive shock wave
and radiation damage, but extensive urban, forest and grass fires; a
resulting major increase in albedo that would take years to decline to
pre-war normal; the effective destruction of planetary technical