"James P. Hogan - The Proteus Operation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

during the months of intensive training that had preceded the dematerialization of the twelve
members of "Operation Proteus," along with their equipment, from a top-secret military
installation at Tularosa, New Mexico, and their reconstitution thirty-six years back in time via
processes involving dimensions, waves, and fields that Ferracini didn't understand. "Gable and
Garbo, Cagney and Bogart, the Walt Disney epics," Winslade had enthused. "The time when Babe Ruth
coached the Brooklyn Dodgers. Orson Welles had just pulled his invaders-from-Mars stunt on the
radio. Joe Louis was knocking out all comers. Sinatra had just gotten started with
Harry James. There was no war-industries conscription for civilians then, no government
rationing of anything, and you didn't need a permit to travel out of state."

All true, Ferracini conceded. But he suspected that either Winslade had led something of a
sheltered earlier existence or nostalgia had been playing tricks with his memory. For Ferracini
had found nothing especially romantic in the spectacle of a nation dreaming and deluding itself
down the road to oblivion while just an ocean away the pogroms had begun, families were being
dragged from their homes to be stripped and beaten in the streets, and the orders of brown-shirted
thugs were now law in cities where people had walked without fear for centuries.

A month had gone by since the Proteus team's arrival in 1939. In that time, Ferracini had
seen the poor, still too traumatized after a decade of Depression despair to find energy for
anything but surviving from one day to the next; he had seen the middle classes, holding the world
at arm's length in their newspapers and protecting their newly regained respectability in
isolationist cocoons of home comforts bought on time and movieland fantasy; and he had seen the
children of the rich, escaping into a tinsel-and-glitter world of celebrities, moonlight over
balustrades and roses, satin gowns, and white tuxedos -- all acting as if ignoring reality would
cause it to reciprocate and leave them alone.

All, that was, except for a few. There had been the Great War veteran that he and Cassidy
had met in the cocktail lounge in New Jersey, for instance, who had denounced the Neutrality Act
and applauded Roosevelt's moves to rebuild the Navy and expand the Army A woman wearing an
"America First" button had started yelling and calling him a warmonger, and when the man that she
was with became threatening, the bartender had thrown him out -- the vet, not the pacifist trying
to start a fight. Typical, Ferracini thought, of a world that accused nations of being



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unreasonable for wanting to defend themselves. Here, all around him, were the roots and causes of
the world that he had come from thirty-odd years in the future.

That was what the Proteus Operation was supposed to change. Personally, Harry Ferracini
was beginning to think they didn't have a prayer.

A glow of light appeared ahead, where a couple of lamps strung on poles revealed a
roadside diner and the outlines of parked trucks against the darkening shadows of the town.
Cassidy, wearing a navy blue woolen watch-cap pulled down over his ears and a heavy overjacket on
top of faded dungarees, hauled his long, lanky frame upright in the passenger seat and pointed.
"There. That's the place I meant -- where we stopped on the last trip. And my stomach
tells me it's getting near eating time, anyhow. What do you figure, Harry -- time for a break?"