"Lawrence Watt - Evans - Real Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

Real Time
LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS




Someone was tampering with time again; I could feel it, in my head
and in my gut, that sick, queasy sensation of unreality.

I put my head down and gulped air, waiting for the discomfort to pass,
but it only got worse.

This was a bad one. Someone was tampering with something serious.
This wasn't just someone reading tomorrow's papers and playing the stock
market, this was serious. Someone was trying to change history.

I couldn't allow that. Not only might his tampering interfere with my
own past, change my whole life, possibly even wipe me out of existence,
but I'd be shirking my job. I couldn't do that.

Not that anyone would know. They must think I'm dead. I haven't been
contacted in years now, not since I was stranded in this century. They
must think I was lost when my machine and my partner vanished in the
flux.

But I'm not dead, and I had a job to do. With help from headquarters
or without, with a partner or without, even with my machine or without, I
had a job to do, a reality to preserve, a whole world to safeguard. I knew
my duty. I know my duty. The past can't take tampering.

They might send someone else, but they might not. The tampering
might have already changed things too much. They might not spot it in
time. Or they might simply not have the manpower. Time travel lets you
use your manpower efficiently, with one hundred percent efficiency,
putting it anywhere you need it instantly, but that's not enough when you
have all of the past to guard, everything from the dawn of time to the
present—not this present, the real present—you'd need a million men to
guard it all, and they've always had trouble recruiting. The temptations
are too great. The dangers are too great. Look at me, stuck here in the
past, for the dangers—and as for the temptations, look at what I have to
do. People trying to change everything, trying to benefit themselves at the
cost of reality itself—they need men they can trust, men like me, and there
can never be enough of us.

I sat up straight again and I looked at the mirror behind the bar and I
knew what I had to do. I had to stop the tampering. Just as I had stopped
it before, three—no, four—four times now.

They might send someone else, but they might not, and I couldn't take
that chance.