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

precious as history itself.

A twinge ran through my stomach; perhaps only an after-effect, but I
had to be certain. I knelt, and went quickly to work with my knife.

When I was done, there could be no doubt that the two were dead, and
that neither could ever have children.

Finished, I turned and fled, before the fumbling police of this era could
interfere.

I knew the papers would report it the next day as the work of a lunatic,
of a deranged thief who panicked before he could take anything, or of
someone killing for perverted pleasure. I didn't worry about that.

I had saved history again.

I wish there were another way, though.

Sometimes I have nightmares about what I do, sometimes I dream that
I've made a mistake, killed the wrong person, that I stranded myself here.
What if it wasn't a mechanical failure that sent the machine into flux,
what if I changed my own past and did that to myself?

I have those nightmares sometimes.

Worse, though, the very worst nightmares, are the ones where I dream
that I never changed the past at all, that I never lived in any time but this
one, that I grew up here, alone, through an unhappy childhood and a
miserable adolescence and a sorry adulthood—that I never traveled in
time, that it's all in my mind, that I killed those people for nothing.

That's the worst of all, and I wake up from that one sweating, ready to
scream.

Thank God it's not true.