"Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Murderer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

a sudden everything seemed real again, and I turned and ran, and I got away-- I'm not sure how. And I
pushed the panic button, but nothing happened. I figured it was because I was in the wrong place, so I
went back out to Berkeley, to the exact same place that the physics building would be in 2020, and I
pushed the button again, and still nothing happened. So I waited for the two days to be up, and nothing
happened, so I threw the gadget away. And I realized what had happened-- I'd changed the past, so the
future I came from wasn't there any more. I couldn't go back to it, because it wasn't there."
Stein asked, "Then how could you have come from it?"
"Because it would have been there if I hadn't," Jones said.
"But... no, never mind. So you're telling me you shot this Hearst character back in 1892?" Stein tried
to collect his scattered thoughts. "What does this have to do with the kid?"
"Nothing," Jones admitted, "Except that it explains why I'm here."
"Because if you hadn't shot him, you'd be back in the twenty-first century?"
"Right."
"I don't think the jury will buy that," Stein said.
Jones shrugged. "No. They'll think I'm nuts."
"Is that it? You're confessing to murdering this Hearst person so they'll think you're crazy? Do you
think that's going to work?"
Jones shrugged again. "Would it help if there were other killings?" he asked. "I don't like to call them
murders."
Stein stared at him for a long moment. "Were there others?" he asked, uneasily.
"Oh, yes," Jones said, smiling. "Lots of them. Adolf Hitler-- I'm proudest of that one, of course. I got
Goering and Goebbels, too, just to be sure. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Josef Dzhugashvili-- he wasn't even
calling himself Stalin yet, but I found him. Rasputin-- he was hard to kill, just like the stories said. Gavrilo
Princip, though all that did was put it off a few years. Mao Tse-tung, of course. Albert Fish-- that's a
smaller scale, but I thought it was worth doing. I wish I'd got him sooner, but he was hard to find. I got
H.H. Holmes as quickly as I could, but of course, he'd got a good start long before I got there-- he was
the second one, I went after him almost as soon as I realized what I'd done. The last one I went after was
Idi Amin, but I couldn't find him at all-- but maybe that's all right, the way things have turned out." He
shrugged again.
"You know all their names," Stein said.
"Well, of course," Jones said, startled. "None of these were random, you know. I went to a lot of
trouble to hunt down the right men."
"They were all men?"
Jones shrugged. "That's the way history is, I guess; yes, they were all men or boys. I suppose I could
have gone after Jiang Qing, but without Mao, why bother?"
"You killed them all?"
Jones nodded proudly. "Every one."
Stein tried to think of a sane response to this ghastly boast. "A lot of foreign names there," he
remarked weakly.
"All over the world," Jones agreed. "I've traveled a lot."
"I don't understand, Mr. Jones; why'd you kill them? Why these particular people?"
"Because I knew what they'd do if I didn't, Mr. Stein-- at least, at first I did."
"At first?"
"That's right," Jones said. "When the Spanish-American War didn't happen on schedule, I was so
pleased-- I was living off a couple of patents I'd sold to Edison, you understand, they'd been a lot harder
than I expected but I had plenty of money, and I'd been trying to discover penicillin but wasn't getting
anywhere, I didn't know how to go about it. Anyway, when the war didn't happen, I figured I'd do better
with that than in medicine or science; I knew history, I didn't know anything about bread mold or
electronics. So I went to Europe after Princip and Lenin and Stalin and the rest, and everything went the
way I expected it, but after 1914... after 1914, I didn't know what was happening. Everything was