"Charles DeVet - Infinity's Child" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeVet Charles)

"You must kill Koski," the leader said. "But I'll be dead before I get there," Buckmaster
replied."What's that got to do with it?" the leader wanted to know.

Infinity's Child
By Charles V. DeVet

THE SENSE of taste was always to go. For a week Buckmaster had ignored the fact that everything
he ate tasted like flavorless gruel. He tried to make himself believe that it was some minor disorder of his
glandular system. But the eighth day his second senseтАФthat of feelingтАФleft him and he staggered to his
telephone in blind panic. There was no doubt now but that he had the dread Plague. He was glad he had
taken the precaution of isolating himself from his family. He knew there was no hope for him now.




They sent the black wagon for him.
In the hospital he found himself herded with several hundred others into a ward designed to hold less
than a hundred. The beds were crowded together and he could have reached to either side of him and
touched another ravaged victim of the Plague.
Next to go would be his sense of sight. Hope was a dead thing within him. Even to think of hoping
made him realize how futile it would be.
He screamed when the walls of darkness began to close in around him. It was the middle of the
afternoon and a shaft of sunlight fell across the grimy blankets on his bed. The sunlight paled, then
darkened .and was gone. He screamed again. And again.
He heard them move him to the death ward then, but he could not even feel their hands upon him.
Three days later his tongue refused to form words. He fought a nameless terror as he strove with all
the power of his will to speak. If he could say only one word, he felt, the encroaching disease would have
to retreat and he would be safe. But the one word would not come.
Four horrible days later the sounds around himтАФthe screams and the mutteringтАФbecame fainter,
and he faced the beginning of the end.
At last it was allover. He knew he was still alive because he thought. But that was all. He could not
see, hear, speak, feel, or taste. Nothing was left except thought; stark, terrible, useless thought!
Strangely the awful horror faded then and his mind experienced a grateful release. At first he
suspected the outlet of his emotions had somehow become atrophied as had his senses, and that he was
peaceful only because his real feelings could not break through the numbness.
However, some subtle compulsion within himтАФsome power struggling in its birth-throesтАФwas
beginning to breed its own energy and he sensed that it was the strength of that compulsion that had
subdued the terror.
He was at peace now, as he had never been at peace before. For a time, he did not questionтАФwas
entirely content to lie there and savor the wonderful feeling. He had lost even the definition of fear. No
terror stow from the slow closing of the five doors; no regrets; no forebodings. Only a vast happiness as
he seemingly viewed life, suffering, and death as a man standing on a cliff looking out over a great misty
valley.
But soon came wonder and analysis. He looked backward and thought: It was a world, but not my
world. These are memories but not my memories. I lived them and knew themтАФyet none of them
belongs to me. StrangeтАФthis soul-fiber with which I thinkтАФthe last function left to meтАФis not a
soul-fiber I have ever known before.
And he knew.
I have never existed before this moment.
 He could not prove it nor explain it there in the dark house of his thinking. But he knew it was true.