"Harlan Ellison - Toward The Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

And that, because he was an arrogant little creep, because his subjective
world-view was the only world-view, because he fried my frijoles, ranked me,
dissed me, ground my gears, and in general cheesed me off . . . I decided to go
"fugitive" and solve his damned mystery, just to slap him in his snotty face
with a dead fish! When they ask you why any great and momentous event in history
took place, tell 'em that all the theories are stuffed full of wild blueberry
muffins. Tell 'em the only reason that makes any sense is this: it seemed like a
good idea at the time.

Launch the Spanish Armada? Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Invent the wheel? Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Drift back in time to 165 Before the Christian Era and find out how one day's
oil bums for eight? Seemed like a good idea at the time. Because Barry R. Levin
was a smartass!

IT WAS ALL CONTAINED in the suit of lights. All of time, and the ability to
drift backward, all of it built into the refined mechanism the academics called
a driftsuit, but which we "fugitives" called our suit of lights. Like a
toreador's elegant costume, it was a glittering, gleaming, shining second-skin.
All the circuits were built in, printed deep in the ceramic metal garment. It
was a specially-developed cermet, pliable ceramic metal, not like the armor worn
by our astronauts mining the Asteroid Belt. Silver and reflective, crosstar
flares at a million points of arm and torso and hooded skull.

We had learned, in this time of miracles, that matter and energy are
interchangeable; and that a person can be broken down into energy waves; and
those waves can be fired off into the timestream, toward the light. Time did,
indeed, sweep backward, and one could drift backward, going ever toward that
ultimate light that we feared to enter. Not because of superstition, but because
we all understood on a level we could not explain, that the light was the start
of it all, perhaps the Big Bang itself.

But we could go fugitive, drift back and back, even to the dawn of life on this
planet. And we could return, but only to the moment we had left. We could not go
forward, which was just as well. Literally, the information that was us could be
fired out backward through the timestream as wave data.

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And the miracle was that it was all contained in the suit of lights. Calibrate
it on the wrist-cuff, thumb the "activate" readout that was coded to the DNA of
only the three of us who were timedrifters, and no matter where we stood, we
turned to smoke, turned to light, imploded into a scintillant point, and
vanished, to be fired away, and to reassemble as ourselves at the shore of the
Sea of Reeds as the Egyptians were drowned, in the garden of Gethsemane on the