Arthur C Clarke & Stephen Baxter [Time Odyssey 02] Sunstorm (v4.0) (pdf)
Alan Dean Foster Spellsinger 06 The Time Of The Transferance
Anna Leigh Keaton, Madison Layle [Once Upon A Time] M
James Axler Deathlands 044 Crucible of Time
Wignall Kevin Na kogo wypadnie
To Fit the Crime Joe Haldeman
Doyle Arthur Conan Tajemnica zśÂotego Pince nez
Blackmailed Sister in law
Layle, Madison Incognito Owning Rachel[Cobblestone]
Ellis Lucy ZarćÂczyny w Rzymie
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had the local drifts mapped for the last fifty thousand years. We would have
gone back even farther, except that we weren't up to designing machinery and
electronics equipment that could last much longer. In the end, we decided that
we'd have to someday build a beachhead back there, and then use it as a base for
further temporal explorations into the past.
* * *
Mayor Jenkins managed to find a genuine Catholic priest who was willing to
commit the unspeakably sinful task of marrying two people who were not of his
faith. He turned out to be an impoverished fellow of mostly Indian ancestry who
hailed from one of the poorest sections of Paraguay.
Even so, he didn't come cheap. In return for his services, KMH bought and
installed a complete water and sewage system for the extended village that was
his parish. He also got a small, but well equipped hospital, two food processing
plants (to get local products ready for market), and a small fleet of trucks (to
get those processed products to those markets). Finally, he gouged us for the
materials necessary for the building of a church, a rectory, and a minimal house
for every family in the parish.
The priest figured that if he was going to sell his only soul to the rich and
boorish, he might as well charge all that the traffic would bear!
It was months before he arrived, since he demanded his pay, or rather his loot,
up front. Then, once he got here, he insisted on taking six weeks for the
posting of the banns, time which he planned to use to educate us in the one true
religion. Fortunately, he spoke no English, we spoke no Spanish, and the
translators that I was paying for somehow found more pressing things to do, so
his plan didn't quite work out.
He then demanded that I cease sleeping with Barbara until the wedding.
I politely suggested that in return, it would only be proper that we should burn
his building materials, put sugar in the gas tanks of all of his pretty, new
trucks, and dynamite his nice, new water and sewage system. Eventually, he saw
the light.
It's a hell of a thing. A sold out sky pilot who won't stay bought!
* * *
Meanwhile, work on the Time Train went on.
With the local temporal drifts mapped out, we went into Phase Two of the
project. This involved canisters big enough to transport equipment, supplies,
and people. After some debate, we settled on a canister sixteen feet in diameter
and sixty feet long, big enough to take a standard shipping container and the
truck it drove in on, or to comfortably seat fifty people, along with all of
their luggage.
Long hours were spent in meetings, hammering out our plans. After months of
debate, what we came up was this:
The first part of the drill was to be much like that used on the smaller,
exploratory canisters, except that now we knew where we were going, as well as
when. The first canister would weave its way through five dimensions, arrive at
the predetermined site for a few nanoseconds, and then go away, taking nine
thousand cubic feet of rock away with it. The second would arrive by the same
route, a few nanoseconds behind, and materialize in the vacuum left by the
departing first canister.
And yes, we probably could leave the first canister in position, and discard
only its contents, saving the cost of the second canister entirely, but this
procedure would leave the walls of the canister impregnated with rock, which
weakened the metal in an unpredictable way, and made it radioactive. In
addition, the temporal circuitry itself wasn't all that dependable after it had
emerged once in solid rock.
Time, money, and human effort weren't among our problems. We had plenty of
resources, so there wasn't any incentive to chintz on the job.
The second canister sat there until the the third canister was scheduled to
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arrive. Just before that point, it sent its contents (mostly air, along with
anything else that might have leaked in) out into the fifth dimensional void so
that the third canister could emerge into a truly hard vacuum.
Once the third canister made it safely back to the twentieth century, that
particular leg of the Time Train was declared ready to be put into service.
Then, a work crew could be sent back, armed with temporal digging tools, to
tunnel their way up to the surface.
The temporal drifts were such that we were able put our first big canister back
some two hundred and thirty-five years, and still be under the island. Before
that, and they would emerge in the rock under the sea, and that didn't seem like
something that I'd personally want to dig my way up from.
Intuitively, one would think that the sensible thing to do would be to go in
small steps, sending the first canister back one year, say, and the next back
for two. I mean, that's the way things are normally built. If you are building a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
