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

"Not good to use the same places," Ferracini said. "There'll be more when we come out the
other side of town."

"What? Don't you remember them steaks and onions? And isn't this the place that had the
cute little chick clearing the dishes -- the one that was all made out of boobs and ass? Man, did
she give you some looks!"

"That's the whole point -- I don't want to be remembered."

Cassidy threw up his hands. "Harry, I swear you're turning paranoid...I mean, do you think
you're gonna bump into the Gestapo or something here in the middle of Missouri? We're not across
the pond. This is home turf we're on now"

"Come on, Cassidy. You know better than that."

"Okay, Harry, okay" Cassidy slumped back down in his seat with a sigh.

Ferracini was right, of course. All kinds of things could be happening two months from
then, and there was no way of telling what might depend on somebody's just happening to remember
the truck, a face, or something he'd overheard.

Although the training program had included a series of tutorials intended to give some
idea of the physical theory behind the process, all that Ferracini had really been able to make of
it was that the machine that had been constructed beneath the site at Tularosa was supposed to be
capable of sending objects and people back into the past. That was what Winslade had been involved
in, and why he had spent lots of time talking to scientists.

No actual transfers of people into the past had been effected previously. Only some
preliminary trials had been conducted, which the scientists had described simply as "encouraging,"
without going into detail as to what form the trials had taken. Apparently the rapidly
deteriorating world situation had made it imperative for the mission to proceed at once, without
waiting for all the answers to be revealed.

Three months after the trials, in the large chamber deep below the Tularosa facility, an
egg-shaped capsule the size of a blimp had vanished in a bluish glow from its supports amid
tangles of machinery and windings, and reappeared thirty-six years earlier, shifted five thousand
feet upward as a precaution against positional errors. A set of helium bags had inflated
automatically to lower the capsule to the ground, and fifteen minutes later Ferracini had found
himself standing in the New Mexico desert with the eleven other members of the Proteus mission,
staring up at the night sky of January 1939. The time travelers, after what had surely been one of
the most awesome achievements in the entire history of the physical sciences, had arrived by
balloon.

The Tularosa machine was strictly a one-way device, a "projector," and January 1939 was
the greatest "range," back in the past, that it could reach. To complete a two-way connection, a
machine called a "return-gate" had to be constructed at the far end, for which all the requisite
parts and components had been brought in the capsule. Based on actual timings of dummy-run
assemblies performed during training, the planners had estimated four to five months for the
return-gate to be operational.