"Bester, Alfred - Biped Reegan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bester Alfred)

"It's not much of a story," Otis said. "Ten months ago, we began a war with the
Asiaffs. I don't mind saying that things were desperate for America. The Affs on
one side and the Asians on the other were pressing us hard. We thought we'd been
defeated when overnight every city in the Western Hemisphere was destroyed, down
to the foundations. All of them simply dissolved and sank thundering into the
earth. Millions were killed. . .
"Then, slowly, the news began to filter through that the same thing had happened
to Asia, Africa and Europe. Every city throughout the world had been destroyed.
We began to realize that the same menace was striking at both war parties....
Then the ants came. By the billions, they came. They swept over us, destroying
food, supplies, communications . . . and lastly us."
"That's all the story?" Gropper asked.
"Enough of it. I don't like to think of my wife . . . of my friends . . . "Otis
shuddered. "It's enough to say that the world banded together against the
onslaught of the ants too late. We here are the last survivors of a murdered
world . . ."
There was a long silence while the bipeds reflected drearily on the swift, sure
tactics of your Imperial Maternity's troops that had brought them so low. At
last the biped named Doctor Elmer Gropper spoke.
"And I," he said, "murdered your world. No . . . don't interrupt. I want to tell
you. It won't be long before none of us are alive to care.... Well.... The story
starts twenty years ago at the close of the Second World War. It seemed to me
that nothing could ever prevent another war except rnan himself, and I thought
that man was too underdeveloped to ever do that. I decided to help man
develope..."
"You're crazy!" the red-haired biped, Ivar, said.
"No," Gropper answered. "In theory I was right. I reasoned that some time in the
far future when man had advanced enough intellectually, he would give up
killing. My attempt was to speed up this advancement . . . this artificial
evolution of man . . .
"Yes, it could be done. The history of the world bore me out. Evolution had not
been a slow, steady progress. It had leaped forward in sudden advances . . .and
I discovered what had caused those advances."
The biped Reegan said: "What did?"
"Gas, strangely enough," Gropper replied. "Radon gas. When it is present in the
atmosphere in sufficient quantities, it acts as a catalyst on chromosomatic
genes. It induces a chemical reaction in the molecules that are the
characteristic carriers and causes those jumps in development that De Vries
called mutations and Darwin called the Survival of the Fittest. "
"Yes," the precise biped, Chung, said. "That is more than possible."
"It's a reality," the female, Dinah, put in.
"Altogether too real," Gropper continued. "I built that cavern twenty years ago
and constructed my apparatus there. Those hills are rich in pitchblende. Twenty
years ago the Radon gas began to pour forth and I was jubilant. I knew that
within a decade, perhaps two, evolution would strike at man and advance him far
beyond war and the destructive arts. But last year, when I hired Miss Shaw as my
assistant and we descended to the cavern to check the equipment that had been
operating for two decades, I realized the horrible error I had made."
Reegan said: "What the hell are you talking about?"
"Evolution is mysterious," Gropper said. " Some hundred and fifty million years