"George Alec Effinger - Nick of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

—Dwight D. Eisenhower



Time is an illusion perpetrated by the
manufacturers of space
—Nobody




6
 The Nick of Time
by George Alec Effinger




Book One


The World of Pez Pavilion: Preliminary to the Groundbreaking
Ceremony


***


Day One


Just at noon on the seventeenth of February, 1996, Frank
Mihalik became the first person to travel backward through
time. He looked like an explorer and he spoke like a pioneer.
He was tall and broad-shouldered and well-muscled, with a
deep chest covered with the right amount of dark hair—virile
but not atavistic—with large strong hands but the gentle
manner of a man who has made a gracious peace with the
powerful body nature had given him. He had short dark hair
and bright unyielding eyes. His face was rugged and
handsome, but not pretty and definitely not cute. He spoke in
a low earnest voice and smiled often. He was intelligent but
not tedious, a good friend in times of happiness or sorrow, a
joy to his aging mother, a solid citizen, and a good credit risk.
He had been chosen to make the first trip into the past
because Cheryl, his girlfriend, had roomed at college with a
woman who was now a talent coordinator on a popular late-
night holovision talk show. Such a woman had a lot of
influence in the last years of the twentieth century.