"Budrys, Algis - Rogue Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Budrys Algis)

"Rogan?" he said softly. "Rogan?"
He waited, watching Rogan's lips move almost soundlessly. He sighed at last and asked Weston, "Can you do anything for him?"
"Cure him," Weston said confidently. "Electroshock treatments. They'll make him forget what happened to him in that place. He'll be all right."
"I didn't know electroshock amnesia was permanent."
Weston blinked at Hawks. "He may need repetitive treatment now and then, of course."
"At intervals for the remainder of his life."
"That's not always true."
"But often."
"Well, yes . . ."
"Rogan," Hawks was whispering. "Rogan, I'm sorry."
"An dark . . . an dark. . . . It hurt me and it was so cold . . . so quiet I could hear myself."

Edward Hawks, D.Sc., walked alone across the main laboratory's concrete floor, his hands at his sides. He chose a path among the generators and consoles without looking up, and came to a halt at the foot of the matter transmitter's receiving stage.
The main laboratory occupied tens of thousands of square feet in the basement of Continental Electronics' Research Division building. A year ago, when Hawks had designed the transmitter, part of the first and second floors above it had been ripped out, and the transmitter now towered up nearly to the ceiling along the far wall. Catwalks interlaced the adjoining airspace, and galleries had been built for access to the instruments lining the walls. Dozens of men on Hawks' staff were still moving about, taking final checks before closing them down for the day. Their shadows on the catwalks, now and then occluding some overhead light, mottled the floor in shifting patterns of darkness.
Hawks stood looking up at the transmitter, his eyes puzzled. Someone abruptly said, "Ed!" and he turned his head in response.
"Hello, Sam." Sam Latourette, his chief assistant, had walked up quietly. He was a heavy-boned man with loose, papery flesh and dark-circled, sunken eyes. Hawks smiled at him wanly. "The transmitter crew just about finished with their post-mortem, are they?"
"You'll find the reports on your desk in the morning. There was nothing wrong with the machinery. Nothing anywhere." Latourette waited for Hawks to show interest. But Hawks only nodded his head. He was leaning one hand against a vertical brace and peering into the receiving stage. Latourette growled, "Ed!"
"Yes, Sam?"
"Stop it. You're doing too much to yourself." He again waited for some reaction, but Hawks only smiled into the machine, and Latourette burst out, "Who do you think you're kidding? How long have I been working with you now? Ten years? Who gave me my first job? Who trained me? You can keep up a front with anybody else, but not with _me!_" Latourette clenched his fist and squeezed his fingers together emptily. "I _know_ you! But--damn it, Ed, it's not your fault that thing's out there! What do you expect--that nobody'll ever get hurt? What do you want--a perfect world?"
Hawks smiled again in the same way. "We tear a gateway where no gate has ever been," he said, nodding at the mechanisms, "in a wall we didn't build. That's called scientific investigation. Then we send men through the gate. That's the human adventure. And something on the other side--something that never bothered mankind; something that's never done us any harm before or troubled us with the knowledge that it was there--kills them. In terrible ways we can't understand, it kills them. So I keep sending in more men. What's that called, Sam?"
"Ed, we _are_ making progress. This new approach is going to be the answer."
Hawks looked curiously at Latourette.
Latourette said uncomfortably, "Once we get the bugs out of it. That's all it needs. It's the thing that'll do the trick, Ed--I know it."
Hawks did not change his expression or turn his face away. He stood with his fingertips forced against the machine's gray crackle finish. "You mean--we're no longer killing them? We're only driving them insane with it?"
"All we have to do, Ed," Latourette pressed him, "all we have to do is find a better way of cushioning the shock when the man feels his death. More sedatives. Something like that."
Hawks said, "They still have to go into that place. How they do it makes no difference; it won't tolerate them. It was never made for human beings to have anything to do with. It was never made for the human mind to measure in human terms. We have to make a new language for describing it, and a new way of thinking in order to be able to understand it. Only when we've finally got it apart, whatever it is, and seen, and felt, and touched and tasted all its pieces, will we ever be able to say what it might be. And that will only be after we've been through it, so what good will our new knowledge do these men who have to die, now? Whatever put it there, no matter why, no human being will ever be able to live in it until after human beings have lived through it. How are you going to describe that in plain English so a sane man can understand it? It's a monstrous thing we're dealing with. In a sense, we have to think like monsters, or stop dealing with it, and let it just sit there on the Moon, no one knows why."
Latourette reached out sharply and touched the sleeve of his smock. "Are you going to shut the program down?"
Hawks looked at him.
Latourette was clutching his arm. "Cobey. Isn't he ordering you to cancel it?"
"Cobey can only make requests," Hawks said gently. "He can't order me."
"He's company president, Ed! He can make your life miserable. He's dying to get Continental Electronics off this hook."
Hawks took Latourette's hand away from his arm and moved it to the transmitter's casing. He put the flats of his own palms into his back pockets, nicking up his white laboratory smock. "The Navy originally financed the transmitter's development only because it was my idea. They wouldn't have vouchered that kind of money for anyone else in the world. Not for a crazy idea like this." He stared into the machine. "Even now, even though that place we found is the way it is, they still won't let Cobey back out on his own initiative. Not as long as they think I can keep going. I don't have to worry about Cobey." He smiled softly and a little incredulously. "Cobey has to worry about me."
"Well, how _about_ you? How much longer can you keep this up?"
Hawks stepped back. He looked at Latourette thoughtfully. "Are we worrying about the project now, or are we worrying about me?"
Latourette sighed. "All right, Ed, I'm sorry," he said. "But what're you going to do?"
Hawks looked up and down at the matter transmitter's towering height. In the laboratory space behind them, the technicians were now shutting off the lights in the various subsections of the control array. Darkness fell in horizontal chunks along the galleries of instruments and formed black diagonals like jackstraws being laid upon the catwalks overhead. It advanced in a proliferating body toward the solitary green bulb shining over the "NOT Powered" half of the "Powered/NOT Powered" red-and-green legend painted on the transmitter's lintel.
"We can't do anything about the nature of the place to which they go," Hawks said. "And we've reached the limit of what we can do to improve the way we send them there. It seems to me there's only one thing left to do. We must find a different kind of man to send. A man who won't go insane when he feels himself die." He looked quizzically into the machine's interior.
"There are all sorts of people in the world," he said. "Perhaps we can find a man who doesn't fear Death, but loves her."
Latourette said bitterly, "Some kind of psycho."
"Maybe that's what he is. But I think we need him, nevertheless." All the other laboratory lights were out, now. "What it comes down to is that we need a man who's attracted by what drives other men to madness. And the more so, the better. A man who's impassioned by Death." His eyes lost focus, and his gaze extended itself to infinity. "So now we know what I am. I'm a pimp."


2

Continental Electronics' Director of Personnel was a broad-faced man named Vincent Connington. He came briskly into Hawks' office and pumped his hand enthusiastically. He was wearing a light blue shantung suit and russet cowboy boots, and as he sat down in the visitors' chair, puckering the corners of his eyes in the mid-afternoon sunshine streaming through the venetian blinds, he looked around and remarked, "Got the same office layout myself, upstairs. But it sure looks a lot different with some carpeting on the floor and some good paintin's on the walls." He turned back to Hawks, smiling. "I'm glad to get down here and talk to you, Doctor. I've always had a lot of admiration for you. Here you are, running a department and still getting in there and working right with your crew. All I do all day is sit behind a desk and make sure my clerks handle the routine without foulin' up."
"They seem to do rather well," Hawks said in a neutral voice. He was beginning to draw himself up unconsciously in his chair and to slip a mask of expressionlessness over his face. His glance touched Connington's boots once and then stayed away. "At least, your department's been sending me some excellent technicians."
Connington grinned. "Nobody's got any better." He leaned forward. "But that's routine stuff." He took Hawks' interoffice memo out of his breast pocket. "_This_, now--This request, I'm going to fill personally."
Hawks said carefully, "I certainly hope you can. I expect it may take some time to find a man fitting the outlined specifications. I hope you understand that, unfortunately, we don't have much time. I--"
Connington waved a hand. "Oh, I've got him already. Had him in mind for a long time."
Hawks' eyebrows rose. "Really?"