"Anderson, Poul - Brain Wave" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

Felix Mandelbaum had been born fifty years ago in the noise and dirt and sweatshops of the lower East Side, and life had been kicking him around ever since; but he kicked back, with a huge enjoyment. He'd been everything from itinerant fruit picker to skilled machinist and O.S.S. operative overseas during the warЧwhere his talent for languages and people must have come in handy. His career as a labor organizer ran parallel, from the old Wobblies to the comparative respectability of his present job: officially executive secretary of a local union, actually a roving trouble shooter with considerable voice in national councils. Not that he had been a radical since his twenties; he said he'd seen radicalism from the inside, and that was enough for any sane man. Indeed, he claimed to be one of the last true conservativesЧonly, to conserve, you had to prune and graft and adjust. He was self-educated, but widely read, with more capacity for life than anyone else of Corinth's circle except possibly Nat Lewis. Fun to know.

"Hello," said the physicist. "You're late today."

"Not exactly." Mandelbaum's voice was a harsh New York tone, fast and clipped. He was a small, wiry, gray-haired man, with a gnarled beaky face and intense dark eyes. "I woke up with an idea. A reorganization plan. Amazing nobody's thought of it yet. It'd halve the paper work. So I've been outlining a chart."

Corinth shook his head dolefully. "By now, Felix, you should know that Americans are too fond of paper work to give up one sheet," he said.

"You haven't seen Europeans," grunted Mandelbaum.

"You know," said Corinth, "it's funny you should've had your idea just today. (Remind me to get the details from you later, it sounds interesting.) I woke up with the solution to a problem that's been bedeviling me for the past month."

"Hm?" Mandelbaum pounced on the fact, you could almost see him turning it over in his hands, sniffing it, and laying it aside. "Odd." It was a dismissal.

The elevator stopped and they parted company. Corinth took the subway as usual. He was currently between cars; in this town, it just didn't pay to own one. He noticed vaguely that the tram was quieter than ordinarily. People were less hurried and unmannerly, they seemed thoughtful. He glanced at the newspapers, wondering with a gulp if it had started, but there was nothing really sensationalЧexcept maybe for that local bit about a dog, kept overnight in a basement, which had somehow opened the deep freeze, dragged out the meat to thaw, and been found happily gorged. Otherwise: fighting here and there throughout the world, a strike, a Communist demonstration in Rome, four killed in an auto crashЧwords, as if rotary presses squeezed the blood from everything that went through them.

Emerging in lower Manhattan, he walked three blocks to the Rossman Institute, limping a trifle. The same accident which had broken his nose years ago had injured his right knee and kept him out of military service; though being yanked directly from his youthful college graduation into the Manhattan Project might have had something to do with that.

He winced at the trailing memory. Hiroshima and Nagasaki still lay heavily on his conscience. He had quit immediately after the war, and it was not only to resume his studies or to escape the red tape and probing and petty intrigue of government research for the underpaid sanity of academic life; it had been a flight from guilt. So had his later activities, he supposedЧthe Atomic Scientists, the United World Federalists, the Progressive Party. When he thought how those had withered away or been betrayed, and recalled the brave cliches which had stood like a shield between him and the Soviet snarlЧthere for any to see who had eyesЧhe wondered how sane the professors were after all.

Only, was his present retreat into pure research and political passivityЧvoting a discouraged Democratic ticket and doing nothing elseЧany more balanced? Nathan Lewis, frankly labeling himself a reactionary, was a local Republican committeeman, an utter and cheerful pessimist who still tried to salvage something; and Felix Mandelbaum, no less realistic than his chess and bull-session opponent Lewis, had more hope and energy, even looked forward to the ultimate creation of a genuine American Labor Party. Between them, Corinth felt rather pallid.

And I'm younger than either one!

He sighed. What was the matter with him? Thoughts kept boiling up out of nowhere, forgotten things, Linking themselves into new chains that rattled in his skull. And just when he had the answer to his problem, too.

That reflection drove all others out. Again, it was unusual: ordinarily he was slow to change any train of thought. He stepped forward with a renewed briskness.

The Rossman Institute was a bulk of stone and glass, filling half a block and looking almost shiny among its older neighbors. It was known as a scientist's heaven. Able men from all places and all disciplines were drawn there, less by the good pay than by the chance to do unhampered research of their own choosing, with first-rate equipment and none of the projectitis which was strangling pure science in government, in industry, and in too many universities. It had the inevitable politicking and backbiting, but in lesser degree than the average college; it was the Institute for Advanced StudyЧless abstruse and more energetic, perhaps, and certainly with much more room. Lewis had once cited it to Mandelbaum as proof of the cultural necessity for a privileged class. "D'you think any government would ever endow such a thing and then, what's more, have the sense to leave it to itself?"

"Brookhaven does all right," Mandelbaum had said, but for him it was a feeble answer.

Corinth nodded to the girl at the newsstand in the lobby, hailed a couple of acquaintances, and fumed at the slowness of the elevator. "Seventh," he said automatically when it arrived.

"I should know that, Dr. Corinth," grinned the operator. "You've been hereЧlet's seeЧalmost six years now, isn't it?"

The physicist blinked. The attendant had always been part of the machinery to him; they had exchanged the usual pleasantries, but it hadn't meant a thing. Suddenly Corinth saw him as a human being, a living and unique organism, part of an enormous impersonal web which ultimately became the entire universe, and yet bearing his own heart within him. Now why, he asked himself amazedly, should I think that?

"You know, six," said the attendant, "I been wondering. I woke up this morning and wondered what I was doing this for and if I really wanted more out of it than just my job and my pension andЧ" He paused awkwardly as they stopped to let off a third-floor passenger. "I envy you. You're going somewhere."

The elevator reached the seventh floor. "You couldЧwell, you could take a night course if you wanted," said Corinth.

"I think maybe I will, sir. If you'd be so kind as to recommendЧWell, later. I got to go now." The doors slid smoothly across the cage, and Corinth went down hard marble ways to his laboratory.

He had a permanent staff of two, Johansson and Grunewald, intense young men who probably dreamed of having labs of their own someday. They were already there when he entered and took off his coat.

"Good morning Е 'Morning Е 'Morning."

"I've been thinking, Pete," said Grunewald suddenly, as the chief went over to his desk. "I've got an idea for a circuit that may workЧ"