"David Weber & Linda Evans - Hells Gate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

Garlath was supposed to be a temporal scout, after all. That meant he was supposed to take the abrupt
changes in climate trans-temporal travel imposed in stride. It also meant he was supposed to be confident
in the face of the unknown, well versed in movement under all sorts of conditions and in all sorts of
terrain. He was not supposed to be so obviously intimidated by endless square miles of trees.
Jasak turned away from his troopers to distract himself (and his mounting frustration) while Garlath
tried to get his command squared away. He stood with his back to the brisk, northern autumn and gazed
back through the portal at the humid swamp they had left behind. It was the sort of sight with which
anyone who spent as much time wandering about between universes as the Second Andarans did
became intimately familiar, but no one ever learned to take it for granted.
Magister Halathyn's tone had been dismissive when he described the portal as "only a class three."
But while the classification was accurate, and there were undeniably much larger portals, even a "mere"
class three was the better part of four miles across. A four-mile disk sliced out of the universe . . . and
pasted onto another one.
It was far more than merely uncanny, and unless someone had seen it for himself, it was almost
impossible to describe properly.
Jasak himself had only the most rudimentary understanding of current portal theory, but he found the
portals themselves endlessly fascinating. A portal appeared to have only two dimensions—height, and
width. No one had yet succeeded in measuring one's depth. As far as anyone could tell, it had no depth;
its threshold was simply a line, visible to the eye but impossible to measure, where one universe stopped .
. . and another one began.
Even more fascinating, it was as if each of the universes it connected were inside the other one.
Standing on the eastern side of a portal in Universe A and looking west, one saw a section of Universe B
stretching away from one. One might or might not be looking west in that universe, since portals'
orientation in one universe had no discernible effect on their orientation in the other universe to which they
connected. If one stepped through the portal into Universe B and looked back in the direction from
which one had come, one saw exactly what one would have expected to see—the spot from which one
had left Universe A. But, if one returned to Universe A and walked around the portal to its western
aspect and looked east, one saw Universe B stretching away in a direction exactly 180° reversed from
what he'd seen from the portal's eastern side in Universe A. And if one then stepped through into
Universe B, one found the portal once again at one's back . . . but this time looking west, not east, into
Universe A.
The theoreticians referred to the effect as "counterintuitive." Most temporal scouts, like Jasak,
referred to it as the "can't get there" effect, since it was impossible to move from one side to the other of
a portal in the same universe without circling all the way around it. And, since that held true for any portal
in any universe, no one could simply step through a portal one direction, then step back through it to
emerge on its far side in the same universe. In order to reach the far side of the portal at the other end of
the link, one had to walk all the way around it, as well.
Frankly, every time someone tried to explain the theory of how it all worked to Jasak, his brain hurt,
but the engineers responsible for designing portal infrastructure took advantage of that effect on a routine
basis. It always took some getting used to when one first saw it, of course. For example, it wasn't at all
uncommon to see two lines of slider cars charging into a portal on exactly opposite headings—one from
the east and the other from the west—at the exact same moment on what appeared to be exactly the
same track. No matter how carefully it had all been explained before a man saw it for the first time with
his own eyes, he knew those two sliders had to be colliding in the universe on the other side of that
portal. But, of course, they weren't. Viewed from the side in that other universe, both sliders were
exploding out of the same space simultaneously. . . but headed in exactly opposite directions.
From a military perspective, the . . . idiosyncrasies of trans-temporal travel could be more than a little
maddening, although the Union of Arcana hadn't fought a true war in over two centuries.
At the moment, Jasak stood roughly at the center of the portal through which he had just stepped,
looking back across it at the forward base camp and the swamp they'd left behind. The sunlight on the far