"Evans,.Linda.-.Asprin,.Robert.-.For.King.And.Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Evans Linda)

She grinned and went in search of his pint. He held back a sigh and met the surprised stares of the scientific team. "Well, then, what's this about a breakthrough?" he asked too brightly.
Cedric Banning recovered first, although his eyes continued to blaze with unspoken curiosity. "Beckett's Breakthrough. Yes. Old Terrance has finally done it, is what. We're no longer a theoretical concern."
"Beg pardon?"
Fairfax Dempsey, one of the graduate students, leaned forward eagerly. "He's done it, Captain! Went back in time! Full translation for sixteen minutes, right into the court of King Henry II, he said. He listened to Henry discussing the invasion of Ireland with his privy council! Beckett's bloody well made history today!" The young man chuckled as he realized the double meaning. "Twice, in fact. Once going into it, once making it."
"Why he chose that time and place to visit," Brenna McEgan muttered, "baffles me. Henry II, for God's sake, bloody-minded butcher . . ."
Stirling scarcely heard her, wondering if the sickening lurch in his gut were disbelief or terror. "D'you mean to say, you've actually perfected time travel?"
"Perfected it?" Brenna McEgan echoed, her tone droll. "Hardly. Beckett very nearly died, before we managed to retrieve his consciousness." Stirling gave her a sharp stare, which she returned with uplifted brow, faintly amused at his shock. "Dr. Beckett may have succeeded in testing his apparatus today, but we are a very long way, indeed, from running a full-bore field test. Naturally, that is precisely what he intends to do, first thing tomorrow morning. He wanted to go again today, but we managed to veto the notion. His heart did not cope well with the first translation—and he was gone only a quarter of an hour. Frankly, the last thing we need is for Beckett to drop dead."
Stirling tried to digest that, while wishing the room would stop lurching about as his equilibrium played catch-up. "Perhaps," he cleared his throat and tried again. "Perhaps someone had better explain all this in more detail?" Like it or not—tired or not—he needed to absorb the science now.
Zenon Mylonas, who'd remained silent until now, nodded. "Very well, Captain."
Dr. Mylonas was one of those perpetually mournful-looking chaps one expects to find in a mortuary, but seldom does. Sitting in the crowded pub, with his lesser colleagues ranged about him, he reminded Stirling of a gawky adolescent, all elbows and knobby shoulders and a discomfited awareness of not quite fitting in properly. His eyes held the look of a man who's faced the worst humanity has to offer itself and has not come up on the winning side.
Realization struck like an electric shock: Mylonas was utterly terrified. By his own research.
The implications were sickening, like a bottomless hole opening out under his feet, when he hadn't expected so much as a crack in the pavement. What the IRA could do with real time travel . . . The crowded pub crashed back into Stirling's awareness with a roar of voices raised in laughter and snatches of drunken song, the perpetual clink of glassware, the blue haze of cigarette smoke, all combining like the clattering of an unseen train roaring past in the fog. An ominous tremor began in the pit of his stomach, worse than pre-combat jitters. Stirling unfroze long enough to completely drain his glass in one long gulp, before gesturing for another. "All right," he finally managed. "Give me a lesson in time travel, professor."
"We'll begin with the basic physics of the project," Mylonas leaned forward, rolling his own empty bar glass between his hands. "You understand, surely, the concept of infinite potential futures? If I do x instead of y and you respond with b instead of c and so on, multiplied by all the physical factors in the universe? A crushed butterfly that robs some bird of its dinner, which prevents the offspring from transmitting a fatal disease that would have wiped out half of Asia. Or a supernova or meteorite being taken as a sign from God, prompting someone to invade a neighbor, abandon a revolution, or engineer a new religion which in turn kills several million people under the guise of saving their souls. If one accepts this as fact—or, perhaps I should say, as unchallenged hypothesis, as we are all scientists laboring under the scientific theory—then one must also understand there are an infinite number of potential pasts, as well. I didn't do x, but did y instead, you didn't respond with b, but rather did c."
"Well, I suppose so," Stirling frowned, "but look here, this doesn't make logical sense. How can both x and y have happened, when clearly, only x did happen?"
"It's a matter of quantum physics," Mylonas said patiently, "or rather, a matter of fractural physics, which is not something even your average quantum physicist has begun to grasp."
"Fractural physics?" Stirling echoed. "What the devil is that?"
"A bloody Nobel Prize," Cedric Banning grinned, raising his half-drained glass in a salute.
Mylonas shot Banning a quelling glance. "Quite. If the Home Office will ever allow us to publish our data." The haunted look in the man's eyes deepened. Stirling narrowed his gaze, realizing abruptly that Mylonas wanted the Home Office to keep his work classified. Oddly, none of the others appeared to be so deeply rattled. Rampant delight was the operative word at this table. What did Mylonas know, that the others hadn't glimpsed, yet?
"Go on, please," Stirling said quietly, sipping from his second glass of stout. "What is fractural physics?"
"A mathematical way of describing, of accounting for, the impossibilities in observation which neither quantum physics nor its mathematical system can explain. Surely you knew, already, that the simple act of observation literally brings a thing into being, at the quantum level? Observation equals creation. If you ask the right question, in other words, the universe obliges you by providing a previously nonexistent answer. And if a thing exists, it can be fractured into something else; time is no exception. In fact, without fractural physics, nothing would—or could—exist."
It sounded barmy to Stirling, but then, he'd barely squeaked past subjects like tensor calculus and non-Euclidian geometry, never mind quantum relativity.
"What we've done here," Mylonas nodded toward the distant research lab, "is the elementary work of understanding how fractural physical laws operate. And what we've discovered is both infinite futures and infinite pasts, all coexisting in fractured planes, sliding over and past and through one another, a bit like a child's kaleidoscope, where the patterns and colors shift as the colored pebbles tumble about. Fractural physics provides the only scientific explanation of psychic phenomena, in fact. The human mind has billions of neural connections hardwired into the nervous system and the senses. We haven't manufactured an instrument, yet, of that complexity.
"I rather fancy that precognition occurs when an individual with particularly acute senses encounters the intersection of fractural planes and is abruptly confronted by two possible futures. Two or more. There are people attuned to the future of fractural planes, just as others are attuned to a fractural plane's past. You might think in terms of one set of instruments tuned to ham radio frequencies and another tuned to microwave transmissions. People who have learned to shift their own consciousness from one plane to another—so called astral projection or out-of-body experience—are actually moving the pattern of their consciousness from one plane to another, or to some other referent point on their own plane. What we've done is engineer a way to hook the conscious portion of a human mind, which is, after all, merely a pattern of energy which can be codified and transferred from one point to another, through the endless shifting of fractural planes—"
"Wait, slow down!" Stirling resisted the temptation to massage aching temples.
Mylonas halted, brows climbing into his receding hairline. "What don't you understand? It's perfectly simple, at least in concept. It's the engineering that's a bit tricky."
"May be simple to you," Stirling muttered, "but it's perfectly impossible from where I sit. Look, perhaps I'll grant you that bit about consciousness being a shifting energy pattern. I've seen some pretty odd things, ran across a fellow once who swore on stacks of holy treatises he had yearly out-of-body experiences, and he wasn't a candidate for the loony bin, either. So maybe, for the sake of argument, I'll buy your story about projecting someone's consciousness somewhere else. But somewhen else? I'm not a credulous fool!"
"Neither am I," Mylonas said very quietly. Stirling was struck again by the depth of fright in those dark eyes.
"Suppose you explain it again. Pretend I'm a newspaper reporter or some chap on the dole, with no more science education than, say, that keg of ale can lay claim to. On second thought, perhaps you'd better leave off telling me why it works and just try explaining why it could prove dangerous in a terrorist's hands?" He had to fight the impulse to glance at Brenna McEgan.
"They might well be interested," Mylonas said patiently, "because of the potential for change, which is inherent in the shifting of the fractural planes. Changing a variable, even a minor one, could have drastic consequences. I have tried to warn Dr. Beckett against rushing blindly ahead, before proper precautions can be taken, but he won't be stopped. Not by anything short of dying, anyway. Who do you think requested help from the Home Secretary? It was not Dr. Terrance Beckett. God help us, if terrorists ever get hold of this work."
The level of tension at the crowded table rose abruptly, like a nasty miasma over a swamp, compounded of equal parts suspicion, fear, and anger. More than one set of eyes flicked uncertainly toward Brenna McEgan. She sat cool as a queen at her corner of the table, sapphire eyes focused on a speck of dust that floated somewhere over the center of the untidy tabletop. When nobody broke the awkward silence, Stirling cleared his throat.
"Surely there's no way to actually change anything in the past? It's already happened, with no way to undo it. And even if you could, wouldn't paradox destroy any possibility of changing things, stop you before you got started?"
Mylonas shook his head. "You're forgetting the infinite pasts part of the equation. If you projected the energy pattern of your consciousness into a past—say, the court of Henry II, as Dr. Beckett did, or even further back, to the time of King Arthur—"
Cedric Banning snorted into his pint of bitters without quite laughing out loud. One of the graduate students dug her elbow into his ribs. As Mylonas reddened, Indrani Bhaskar put in mildly, "There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that King Arthur was quite genuine. Not a king, perhaps, but a real historical figure."
Stirling grinned. "Yes, Dux Bellorum, and all that. Sixth century A.D., wasn't it? Last of the great Romanized Briton Lords of Battle."
"Quite," she smiled. "I see you're a well-read man, Captain Stirling. Mind your manners, Cedric."
Banning laughed, clearly unrepentant, and lifted his glass in a mock salute.
Mylonas cleared his throat. "Yes. Well. If you project yourself into a past, along the fractural plane that resonates most closely with your present, you then find yourself in a new present, with an infinite number of potential futures stretching out before you. Should you take an action contrary to the ones taken on your plane of origin, call it Fractural Prime, then your consciousness will slide into a different fractural resonance, perhaps close to your Prime, perhaps not, depending upon the magnitude of difference between the two."
"Then it isn't changing history at all, is it?" Stirling's mind had filled with images of vast sheets of multihued crystal fragmenting and crashing into one another, until the universe resembled a pile of shattered quartz, pulverized under a geologist's hammer. The longer he thought about it, the more the image disturbed him.
Mylonas sighed. "It's a bit of both actually. It isn't as simple as you imagine."
"What do you mean by that? Either it is or it isn't."
"Not in fractural physics. The key word is resonance. If you switch from one fractural plane to another, the law of conservation of energy—among other things—requires a transfer of resonant energy between them. If the two resonances are sufficiently dissimilar, a dissonance is created. An energy embolism, if you will. Depending on how far back the dissonance occurs, it may have either negligible or very serious consequences in your Fractural Prime. The resulting embolism may produce a minor bruise, or it could produce catastrophic damage."
"Catastrophic?" Stirling blinked. "What, exactly, are we talking about here? What scale? Do you mean the traveler's energy pattern is violently disrupted? As in, fatally? Or do you mean something else? Something . . . worse?"
"That," Mylonas said tiredly, "is precisely what we do not know. The traveler could die, yes. Maybe. Unless the dissonance only affects things after the energy pattern's shift between planes. You might be spared, while everything else fractures around you. If the dissonance is set up in the new fractural plane, you might destroy the future of that plane, rewrite it, so to speak. You'd start with a clean slate, from your perspective, although you might well be killing off billions of people in the secondary plane's future. No way to tell, of course, subjectively, from the traveler's viewpoint.
"But suppose the dissonance affects the old fractural plane, the Prime you originally came from. This one." Mylonas rapped bony knuckles against the tabletop. "What do you have, then? Your action in moving from Fractural Prime to Fractural Secondary destroys both the present and the future of your plane of origin. Shatters it to bits, in fact. By setting up the dissonant energy pattern in the past of one fractural plane, you utterly destroy at least one future, possibly both. Not a terribly attractive situation for scholars, but frightfully attractive to some madman bent on vengeance. Or a terrorist bent on political blackmail."
"Dear God," Stirling whispered, staring into Mylonas' haunted eyes. "You're talking about the murder of billions of human souls!" He didn't know precisely how many people there were in the world, but it was an appalling number to snuff out in one fell swoop.
"Yes." Mylonas swallowed. "That is the reason the Home Office insisted on sending a chap who understands counterterrorism."
Stirling struggled to reorder his entire view of the tactical situation. Indeed, his view of the entire universe. He glanced around the table, finding stunned eyes and expressions of rising horror. Clearly, none of them had fully grasped the project's lethal potential until now. Unless, of course, one of them was a terrorist, someone who would have realized exactly what could be accomplished using this project. Getting himself—or herself—onto the team wouldn't have been easy, granted. But there was that fatal motor crack-up, which had killed two members of the senior research team. The realization left Stirling's insides shaking. Brenna McEgan was staring bleakly into her own ale glass, fingers clenched white. Her sapphire eyes were nearly as haunted as Zenon Mylonas'. How much death had she seen, coming up from a place like Londonderry, where explosive violence and terrorist murder was nearly as common as it was in Belfast?
Stirling cast back over those dossiers he'd read, both Colonel Ogilvie's and Marc Blundell's, trying to recall everything documented on Brenna McEgan. There hadn't been much, which left him cursing the incompleteness of the material. Dammit, he needed to know how many times the people at this table had wet themselves in their prams, and the Home Office handed him a synopsis measured in thirty-second sound bites. Was Brenna McEgan the evil djinn in the bottle? Or was she simply too obvious a candidate?
Whoever his terrorist proved to be, if there even was a terrorist, once the djinn was loose . . . Several billion souls, destroyed instantly. It was unthinkable.
Stirling shuddered.