"The Iranian Hit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pendleton Don)

Prologue

There were times when it would seem to a rational man that the whole world had gone crazy. But Mack Bolan knew that it had not. There were a lot of crazy people, sure — and even a few lunatic nations; these could not, however, state the case for the planet earth. The state of the planet was complexity, not insanity. Complexity, Bolan knew, was a natural consequence of growth. As the world's human population increased, and as individuals within that population continued to expand and evolve into smarter and more perceptive humans, then the problems of living together on this crowded earth increased geometrically — sometimes with quantum leaps.

The problem, as Bolan saw it, is that we do not all expand in the same direction, at the same time, or from the same stimuli. Equality between individuals was a political idea — and one not in conformity with natural law. The jungle knew better. All of man's great social inventions were, after all was said and done, a mortal attempt to repeal the laws of nature.

Anomaly. There was a word popularized by the space scientists (who had their own ideas about how to deal with natural law). Anomaly. It had to do with events that had not been planned, or intended....things existing outside the established order, something irregular or abnormal.

Abnormal was another word for crazy. So maybe that was why so many people were arriving at the conclusion that the world was headed that way. But it was not. Actually, the world was anomalous, a natural product of abnormal expectations in the human mind. The world of men was not a fixed system. It was not of a single piece but composed of many individuals and diverse elements, classes, types. Therefore, anomalous — because everyone expected everyone else to think and feel and view the world precisely as (or within narrow limits, the same as) he or she did. The world was not crazy, nor was it endowed with a natural sameness. And that was the problem for mankind. In complexity, things were never equal.

Men who could discuss learnedly the chemical composition of a distant star occupied the same time and space as aboriginal peoples who believed that star to be a tiny light imbedded in some celestial web suspended just beyond the earth. Men who right now were devising exotic environmental systems for human colonies in space share the planet with others who devoutly insist that man's adventures upon the moon were actually filmed in Hollywood as some godless hoax upon the world.

Anomalies, sure. They sprang naturally from the conflicting world views held by individuals who were not, in any sense, equals. If a man or woman is the sum total of all his or her experiences, how then can there be any claim of sameness between a Nobel physicist and an Australian bushman — or, for that matter, between a Beverly Hills housewife and her counterpart in Karachi. How do you get these widely disparate individuals to share a common world view when their basic thought processes do not follow the same track? More than a difference in language, or even in social cultures, the difference that divides is a conceptual chasm: the one simply cannot communicate with the other except toward the most elemental biological needs.

So... back to Square One. The world is not crazy. Its parts simply do not understand one another. And these parts need not be geographical divisions, particularly. The parts may exist side by side within the same city or village — within the same family, even. The parts are called human beings — and each is awfully isolated from everything else that exists, totally alone in the jungle of survival and crying out that quot;the worldquot; has gone crazy because anomaly is the order of the day.

An anomaly can occur only where some specific expectation exists. An expectation is a human invention, usually born somewhere outside the jungle. It often finds form as an attempt to repeal some natural law while clothing itself as conventional wisdom.

Now and then, however, the expectation is no more than jungle law masquerading as moral order — and here is where anomaly ends and quot;crazyquot; begins.

Mack Bolan knew all about crazy, too. He did not live in the anomalous world. Bolan had dwelt all his adult life in the jungle of survival... and he knew its ways.