"George Alec Effinger - Everything But Honor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

“Why don’t you travel back a week or so,” suggested Bonn. “Then you can take a photograph or find
some other proof to validate the experiment, and return immediately to Gottingen and time T 0.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” said Placide. “I’d like to choose my own destination, and possibly solve
a little historical problem while I have the chance.” The Cage would never have existed without him, and
so it didn’t take him long to persuade the others. Placide and Fein worked with Marquand and his team
for nine more weeks learning to calibrate the Cage. In the meantime, Placide studied everything he could
find about General Twiggs, and he carefully hid his true plan from the Europeans.



Placide should have known that his first attempt would not go smoothly, but as far as he could see, his
plan was foolproof. His reasoning was simple: His primary goal—greater even than testing the operation
of the Cage—was to relieve the barbaric conditions forced on American blacks following the
Confederate Insurrection of 1861.

Although he’d quit the land of his birth, he still felt an unbreakable bond between himself and others of his
race, who could never escape the oppression as he had. A white friend of his father had enabled Placide
to attend Yale University, where he’d studied math, and physics. During the middle 1930s, after he
joined the great community of experimental scientists working in the German Empire, he began to see
how he might accomplish something far more important than adding a new quibble to the study of particle
physics.

The Cage—his Cage, as he sometimes thought of it—gave him the opportunity to make a vital
contribution. His unhappy experiences as a child and a young man in the United States supplied him with
sufficient motive. All he lacked was the means, and this he found through historical research as
painstaking as his scientific work with Dirac and Born.

To Placide, Brigadier General David Emanuel Twiggs seemed to be one of those anonymous yet crucial
players in the long game of history. In 1860 he was the military commander of the Department of Texas.
Although few students of the Confederate Insurrection would even recognize his name, Twiggs
nevertheless had a moment, the briefest moment, when he determined the course of future events. Placide
had come to realize that Twiggs was his target. Twiggs could be used to liberate American blacks from
all the racist hardships and injustices of the twentieth century.

Leaving T0, the Cage brought Placide and Yaakov Fein to San Antonio on December 24, 1860. Fein
agreed to guard the Cage, which had come to rest in a wintry field about three miles from Twiggs’s
headquarters. Fein, of course, had no idea that Placide had anything in mind other than a quick scouting
trip into this city of the past.

Placide began walking. From nearby he could hear the lowing of cattle, gathered now in shadowed
groups beneath the arching limbs of live oaks. He climbed down a hill into a shallow valley of moonlit
junipers and red cedar. The air smelled clean and sharp, although this Christmas Eve in Texas was not as
cold as the February he’d left behind in Germany. Frosty grass crunched underfoot; as he passed through
the weeds, their rough seeds clung to his trouser legs.

His exhilaration at his safe arrival in another time was tempered almost immediately by anxiety over the
danger he was in. If anyone stopped and questioned him, he would have an impossible time explaining
himself. At best, he would be taken for a freed slave, and as such he could expect little if any help from
the local citizens. Worse was the fact that he had no proper identification and no money, and thus he