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

I turned again, and felt the queasiness and pain leap within me, and I
knew I was very close.

I stopped the car and got out, the gun in my pocket and my hand on the
gun, my other hand holding the knife.

One house had a light in the window; the homes on either side were
dark. I scanned, and I knew that that light was it, the center of the
unreality—maybe not the tamperer himself, but something, a focus for the
disturbance of the flow of history.

Perhaps it was an ancestor of the tamperer; I had encountered that
before.

I walked up the front path and rang the bell.

I braced myself, the knife in one hand, the gun in the other.

The porch light came on, and the door started to open. I threw myself
against it.

It burst in, and I went through it, and I was standing in a hallway. A
man in his forties was staring at me, holding his wrist where the door had
slammed into it as it pulled out of his grip. There had been no chainbolt;
my violence had, perhaps, been more than was necessary.

I couldn't take risks, though. I pointed the gun at his face and squeezed
the trigger.

The thing made a report like the end of the world, and the man fell,
blood and tissue sprayed across the wall behind him.

A woman screamed from a nearby doorway, and I pointed the gun at
her, unsure.

The pain was still there. It came from the woman. I pulled the trigger
again.

She fell, blood red on her blouse, and I looked down at her as the pain
faded, as stability returned.

I was real again.

If the man were her husband, perhaps she was destined to remarry, or
to be unfaithful—she would have been the tamperer's ancestor, but he
might not have been. The twisting of time had stopped only when the
woman fell.

I regretted shooting him, then, but I had had no choice. Any delay
might have been fatal. The life of an individual is precious, but not as