"Jack Williamson - Hindsight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

brought me one clue, before the battle," he breathed slowly. "The detector fields
caught a beam of Tony Grimm's, and analyzed the frequencies. He's using achronic
radiation a whole octave higher than anything I've tried. That must be the way to the
sensitivity and penetration I have hoped for."
Hope flickered in the Astrarch's eyes. "You believe you can save us? How?"
"If the highfrequency beam can search out the determiner factors," Brek told
him, "it might be possible to alter them, with a sufficiently powerful field. Remember
that we deal with probabilities, not with absolutes. And that small factors can
determine vast results.
"The pickups will have to be rebuilt. And we'll have to have power. Power to
project the tracer fields. And a river of powerif we can trace out a decisive factor
and attempt to change it. But the power plants are dead.
"Rebuild your pickups," the Astrarch told him. "And you'll have power if I have
to march every man aboard into the conversion furnaces, for fuel."
 Calm again, and confident, the short man surveyed the tall, gaunt Earthman with
wondering eyes.
"You're a strange individual, Veronar," he said. "Fighting time and destiny to
crush the planet of your birth! It isn't strange that men call you the Renegade."
Silent for a moment, Brek shook his haggard head. "I don't want to be baked
alive," he said at last. "Give me powerand we'll fight that battle again."
The wreck dropped Sunward. A score of expert technicians toiled, under Brek's
expert direction, to reconstruct the achronic pickups. And a hundred men labored,
beneath the ruthless eye of the Astrarch himself, to repair the damaged atomic
converters.
They had crossed the orbit of Venus, when the autosight came back to humming
life. The Astrarch was standing beside Brek, at the curved control table. The shadow
of doubt had returned to his reddened, sleepless eyes. "Now," he demanded, "what
can you do about the battle?"
"Nothing, directly," Brek admitted. "First we must search the past. We must find
the factor that caused Tony Grimm to invent a better autosight than mine. With the
highfrequency fieldand the full power of the ship's converters, if need bewe must
reverse that factor. Then the battle should have a different outcome."
The achronintegrators whirred, as Brek manipulated the controls, and the huge
black cube began to flicker with the passage of ghostly images. Symbols of colored
fire flashed and vanished within it.
"Well" anxiously rasped the Astrarch.
"It works!" Brek assured him. "The tracer fields are following all the world lines
that intersected at the battle, back across the months and years. The analyzers will
isolate the smallestand hence most easily alteredessential factor."
The Astrarch gripped his shoulder. "Therein the cubeyourself!"
The ghostly shape of the Earthman flickered out, and came again. A hundred
times, Brek Veronar glimpsed himself in the cube. Usually the scene was the great
arsenal laboratory, at Astrophon. Always he was differently garbed, always younger.
Then the background shifted. Brek caught his breath as he recognized glimpses
of barren, stony, ochercolored hills, and low, yellow adobe buildings. He gasped to
see a freckled, redhaired youth and a slim, tanned, darkeyed girl.
"That's on Mars!" he whispered. "At Toran. He's Tony Grimm. And she's Elora
Roneethe Martian girl we loved."
The racing flicker abruptly stopped, upon one frozen tableau. A bench on the
dusty campus, against a low adobe wall. Elora Ronee, with a pile of books propped