"Keith Laumer - Imperium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

- Chapter 1

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 - Chapter 1




"This Is Where I Came In"
Preface by Harry Turtledove

Worlds of the Imperium and its first sequel, The Other Side of Time, were some of the alternate history I
read in the early 1960s—along with Lest Darkness Fall and The Man in the High Castle—that helped
me discover the subgenre. Assignment in Nowhere, set in the same multiverse, came along a little later,
and isn't a direct sequel to the first two: their protagonist, Brion Bayard, is a bit player in a drama that
doesn't center on him.
I think H. Beam Piper, in his Paratime stories, was the first writer to show the vehicle that transported
his characters from one timeline to another. Keith Laumer was the first, and I think still the only, writer
to show you the Model-T version of a shuttle between timelines. His genius was to make this a
nineteenth-century discovery by a pair of Italian scientists, Maxoni and Cocini. Anybody can do it. If
you do it close to right, you can go from one alternate world to another on a wing and a prayer. But if
you do it wrong . . . look out! There are uncounted timelines where they did it wrong, and trashed the
planet with the energies they unwittingly unleashed. Oops!
In the midst of this Blight of ravaged alternate histories lies the world of the Imperium, where they did it
right, and which has a tidy little trading empire with worlds far enough removed in probability never to
have tried traveling between timelines at all. There is our world, where Maxoni and Cocini apparently
never experimented, and there are a couple of others. Brion Bayard is kidnapped from our timeline by
the Imperium to help solve a nasty problem stemming from one of those other worlds in the middle of
the Blight.
Laumer was clever enough to see that a timeline which discovered a technology for traveling sidewise in
time (to steal a title from Murray Leinster) would concentrate on that technology and ignore other
possibilities. The traders and officers of the Imperium can scoot across the Blight with, if not the greatest
of ease, at least relative safety in Worlds of the Imperium—but, even in the 1960s, they've never run into
nuclear weapons. That's part of the trouble they're facing. The rest gets a lot more complicated: all kinds
of toil and trouble for a double.
If anything, The Other Side of Time is even more convoluted than its predecessor. It's also much more
audacious, and takes in a much broader swath of the multiverse. Turns out the Imperium isn't the only
outfit able to go crosstime after all—and the others who can do it aren't human at all. They're the
evolved descendants of the hairy hominids that we Homo saps exterminated in this sheaf of
timelines—and they look down their (flat) noses at us because we did. To add injury to insult, they've
been traveling across the timelines longer than the Imperium has, and their shuttles are considerably
more sophisticated than anything mere humans can manufacture. Some of them—the Hagroon—have in
mind wiping out the Imperium's timeline altogether, and doing it retroactively so the line was never
there at all. Others don't approve of this, which still doesn't mean they have any particular use for people