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

I had to find the tamperer myself, and deal with him. If I couldn't find
him directly, if he wasn't in this time period but later, then I might need
to tamper with time myself, to change his past without hurting mine.

That's tricky, but I've done it.

I slid off the stool and stood up, gulped the rest of my drink, and laid a
bill on the bar—five dollars in the currency of the day. I shrugged,
straightening my coat, and I stepped out into the cool of a summer night.

Insects sang somewhere, strange insects extinct before I was born, and
the streetlights pooled pale gray across the black sidewalks. I turned my
head slowly, feeling the flux, feeling the shape of the time-stream, of my
reality.

Downtown was firm, solid, still rooted in the past and the present and
secure in the future. Facing in the opposite direction I felt my gut twist. I
crossed the empty street to my car.

I drove out the avenues, ignoring the highways; I can't feel as well on
the highways, they're too far out of the city's life-flow.

I went north, then east, and the nausea gripped me tighter with every
block. It became a gnawing pain in my belly as the world shimmered and
shifted around me, an unstable reality. I stopped the car by the side of the
street and forced the pain down, forced my perception of the world to
steady itself.

When I was ready to go on I leaned over and checked in the glove
compartment. No gloves—the name was already an anachronism even in
this time period. But my gun was there. Not my service weapon; that's an
anachronism, too advanced. I don't dare use it. The knowledge of its
existence could be dangerous. No, I had bought a gun here, in this era.

I pulled it out and put it in my coat pocket. The weight of it, that hard
metal tugging at my side, felt oddly comforting.

I had a knife, too. I was dealing with primitives, with savages, not with
civilized people. These final decades of the twentieth century, with their
brushfire wars and nuclear arms races, were a jungle, even in the great
cities of North America. I had a knife, a good one, with a six-inch blade I
had sharpened myself.

Armed, I drove on, and two blocks later I had to leave the avenue, turn
onto the quiet side-streets, tree-lined and peaceful.

Somewhere, in that peace, someone was working to destroy my home,
my life, my self.