Jack L. Chalker Downtiming the Night S

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be rendered unusable in earlier centuries, with no disruptions to humans. Even
such things as soil and rain balances in certain areas can be altered so that
what's there is subjected to corrosion. Trace elements made in future labs can
be added to areas so that communi-cations on the firing bands are jumbled. A
tiny flaw, subtly introduced in the program used to create the weapons'
microprocessors, can backfire on them over time, although it will test out in
the short run."
There was enough of Moosic and the Sergeant still in there that she did
understand, although the scope of the project was fantastic.
"You see now," Herb said, "that we're in a hell of a fix. We're not cold and
immoral beings, sitting back here taking blind orders from a computer which
gets its orders from nonhuman things up front. We're trying to save the human
race from extinction, here on Earth as well as what it's become out there in
space.
Time's running out, as crazy as that sounds. There is a level of battle which
will cause Earthside to collapse even without the final push, and that's
approaching. Because we work in absolute time when we're in phase relative
time is a misnomer, mean-ing that we are related to the edge a year here for
us advances the edge a year as well. Worse, the assassination of Karl Marx
accelerated that critical point."
"So Eric did them far more harm than good," she commented.
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. We think their plan is simple. We think they hope to
buy absolute time by tracing us back and knocking this complex out of
commission," Lind told her.
"But they already tried that, and it failed!"
"They're not so sure it did," Lind told her. "The attack was part of the loop
that is still being worked out.
They have yet to steal one of our belts, which is why, once the attack was
known, we preset the homing key to bring anyone back to the old location. It
would match with what they know of the geography around the complex, including
what they got from you. We escaped for the same reason that we can't lose up
front we have far more power available to us than they do. It's more
efficient, better managed, and doesn't need to be diverted to defense."
"The trouble is," Herb added, "we still have years to work on the project. The
number of weapons is just plain enormous, and we must make certain we
neutralize as many as possible, in all the countries that had and made them.
And, even with all the power we have, we are about at the maximum number of
people for unrestricted and pinpoint time travel, particularly with the gear
we must occasionally move. We need the time, but we have less than we need
under optimum requirements. At least we need that much, to do what
we can."
She was more practical than that. "What's this have to do with me?"
"First, we must undo the loop that made you. Karl Marx must not die in Trier.
Ideally, however, Neumann must still escape to erase any chance of things
going wrong. That will be tricky. To create Neumann, Alfie must be rescued.
Loops are best undone in the reverse order that they were done, and very
carefully. We want to create no more loops and ripples."
"Why not just prevent the killing of Marx in London, then?" she wanted to
know. "I mean, that's a ripple."
"But it's a ripple in our favor," Lind told her. "It has no major effects, but
as a martyrdom it makes
Earthside's job of changing the past as Moosic knew it even harder. You'll
have to trust us on that one, but that's why Eric and the rest had to go back
to Trier. Their ripple had worked against them, so they had to undo it and
tilt the scale the other way."
She sighed. "I never really understood it all before, and I'm having more
trouble now."
"Time is a complex science. We still don't completely understand all of the
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things that pop up from dealing with and changing it," Doc said
sympathetically. "Just when even we think we have it cold, some wild card
comes up and smacks us in the face, telling us that we aren't so smart after
all."
She shook her head in confusion. She really didn't want to hear anything more, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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