"Geoffrey A. Landis - Time Prime" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

About Time Prime
This one came when I started thinking about time machines, one of the perennial props of science
fiction. You'd think that, if it were possible to make a time machine, the past would be full of time
travelers. Historic events like the crucifixion or the battle of Gettysburg ought to be full of
time-traveling tourists. So where are they? But what if a time machine requires not just a
transmitter, but also a receiver? After all, what good did it do for Marconi to invent the radio
transmitter, until he also invented the radio receiver? From this, it occurred to me that the future
could be just chock-full of people with time machines, just waiting for the first person to invent a
time-receiver. From there it was pretty easy to extrapolate a bit on prime-time news.

I added a few details, like the fact that it's well known (among experimental physicists) that a
theoretical physicist wouldn't even know which end of a soldering iron to hold, and used my
imagination on some of the details. I'd already written a serious story about time travel ("Ripples
in the Dirac Sea,Ó which has been reprinted several times, for example in Nebula Award Stories
25), so I thought I'd do this one a bit lighter. So there you have it.

It was published originally in Algis Budrys' magazine Tomorrow Speculative Fiction in February,
1995.



Time Prime
Geoffrey A. Landis

The transtemporizer consisted of a coil of palladium wire about the size of a nickel, surrounded by a
colorful spaghetti-tangle of wires, breadboard electronics and gadgetry. "Doesn't look like much, does
it?" said Gwendolyn Jones, as she finished adjusting the collimator and stepped back to survey her work.
She was a bit more than just the usual beautiful lab assistant, with a Ph.D. in experimental high-energy
physics from Princeton and a real knock-out figure. This quite literally: if you made an unwise comment
about her figure, like as not she'd knock you flying. Did I mention her black-belt in Tae Kwon Do? She
was just finishing her second year as a postdoc with Zalewski.

"Looks good enough to me," said Zalewski, a short, plump man with a frizzy brown hair and an equally
frizzy beard, called "Doctor Z" by students and colleagues alike. Like most theoretical physicists, he
wasn't much for lab work, but he was unusual in working closely with experimentalists and having
considerable interest in the experiments, even to the point of occasionally helping out at a soldering iron
himself when he thought that the project needed it. (Gwendolyn carefully neglected to tell him that she
always had the undergraduate assistants re-do his solder joints as soon as he left.) The transtemporizer
was based on a combination of his latest ideas on the universe with her ideas of how to make things
work.

"When you energize it, do you really think we can send things back in time?" Gwen commented. She did
her best to look dubious.

Dr. Z snorted. "Of course not. Didn't you read that paper I gave you?" His voice switched over to lecture
mode. "Trans-temporal relocation requires both a sending and a receiving coil. Clearly, we could hardly
send something back to before a receiver existed. When we energize, we're going to receive from
positive t the object we send back next year, when we get the money to build the sending
transtemporizer."