Olinka: переводы

→"My own vision. I was here, in my home, in Johannesburg, reading the newspaper over
dinner -- except it wasn't on newsprint. It was on this thing that looked like a flat plastic
sheet; some sort of computerized reader screen, I think. Anyway, the article I was reading
happened to be -- well, I'm sorry there's no other way to say it. It was about your death."

→"What wasn't a mistake?"

→"Oh. Oh, I am sorry to hear that. But -- well, then, I guess it wasn't a mistake."

→Theo let out air. "I didn't have one," he said.

→"Umm, I'm sorry to have bothered you," said DeVries. "Can I -- may I ask what your own
vision showed?"

→Theo felt his heart racing. What wonderful news! Maybe he hadn't had a vision of his own
for whatever reason, but this woman had seen him twenty-one years hence. Of course he had
to be alive then; of course, Lloyd was wrong when he said Theo would be dead.

→Theo waited silently for her to go on. After a moment, she did. "And it's the visions that I'm
calling about. You see, mine involved you."

→"For the time being, anyway," she said. "If the visions are to be believed, it's going to be
officially renamed Azania sometime in the next twenty-one years."

→"Johannesburg? You mean in South Africa?"

→"My name is Kathleen DeVries," said the woman. "I've been mulling over whether to phone
you. I'm calling from Johannesburg."

→"Hello," said a female voice, in English. "Is this, ah, Theodosios Procopides?" She stumbled
over the name.

→His phone bleeped. Theo picked up the handset. "Hello?"

→Theo returned to his office, the darkness of night visible through his window. All this talk of
visions was disturbing -- especially since he himself hadn't had one. Could Lloyd be right?
Could Theo be dead a mere twenty-one years from now? He was only twenty-seven, for God's
sake; in two decades, he'd still be well shy of fifty. He didn't smoke -- not much of a
statement for any of the North Americans to make, but still an achievement among Greeks. He
worked out regularly. Why on earth should he be dead so soon? There had to be another
explanation for him having no vision.

→"There it is," said Raoul. "A concrete number. Whatever we did here somehow caused the
consciousness of the human race to jump ahead twenty-one years for a period of two
minutes."

→Raoul hit the pause key again.

→"Thanks, Lou," said Houseman. "Most people's visions of course had no time reference in
them, but enough people were in rooms with clocks or calendars on the wall, or reading
electronic newspapers -- there didn't seem to be any paper ones left -- that we've been able
to conjecture a date. It seems that the visions were of a time twenty-one years, six months,
two days, and two hours ahead of the moment at which the visions occurred: the visions
portray the period from 2:21 to 2:23 P.M. Eastern Time on Wednesday, October 23, 2030.
That assumes the occasional aberrations are explicable: some people seemed to be reading
newspapers dated October 22, 2030, or even earlier -- presumably they were reading old
editions. And the time references, of course, depend a great deal on what time zone the
person happens to be in. We're assuming that the majority of people will still live in the same
time zone two decades from now that they happen to live in today, and those that report
times off by a whole number of hours from what we'd expect were in some other time zone --
"

→The picture changed to show CNN's David Houseman, standing in front of a wall of antique
clocks -- even with a breaking story, CNN still strove for interesting visuals.

→" -- David Houseman has more on this story. David?"

→"Ah, good," said Raoul, as they entered. "Look at this." He touched the pause key on the
remote, and Waters sprang into action.

→Lloyd, Michiko, and Theo entered the lounge. Four other people were already there.
White-haired Lou Waters was jerking up and down on screen; the lounge VCR was an old unit
-- some staff member's hand-me-down -- and didn't have a great pause function.