"Dick, Philip K - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

faculties test, which made him in popular parlance a chickenhead. Upon him the contempt of
three planets descended. However, despite this, he survived. He had his job, driving a
pickup and delivery truck for a false-animal repair firm; the Van Ness Pet Hospital and his
gloomy, gothic boss Hannibal Sloat accepted him as human and this he appreciated. Mors
certa, vita incerta, as Mr. Sloat occasionally declared. Isidore, although he had heard the
expression a number of times, retained only a dim notion as to its meaning. After all, if a
chickenhead could fathom Latin he would cease to be a chickenhead. Mr. Sloat, when this
was pointed out to him, acknowledged its truth. And there existed chickenheads infinitely
stupider than Isidore, who could hold no jobs at all, who remained in custodial institutions
quaintly called "Institute of Special Trade Skills of America," the word "special" having to get
in there somehow, as always.
" Ч your husband felt no protection," the TV announcer was saying, "in owning and
continually wearing an expensive and clumsy radiation-proof lead codpiece, Mrs. Klugman?"
"My husband," Mrs. Klugman began, but at that point, having finished shaving, Isidore
strode into the living room and shut off the TV set.
Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total
power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-
wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen,
the dead machines which hadn't worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the
useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless
descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object
within his range of vision, as if it Ч the silence meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it
assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the
silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach
before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the
world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.
He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this
way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept
sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes
with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited
apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin.
Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere
pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for
building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then,
naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here
in his stricken living room atone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.
Better, perhaps, to turn the TV back on. But the ads, directed at the remaining regulars,
frightened him. They informed him in a countless procession of ways that he, a special,
wasn't wanted. Had no use. Could not, even if he wanted to, emigrate. So why listen to that?
He asked himself irritably. Fork them and their colonization, I hope a war gets started there
Ч after all, it theoretically could Ч and they wind up like Earth. And everybody who
emigrated turns out to be special.
Okay, he thought; I'm off to work. He reached for the doorknob that opened the way out
into the unlit hall, then shrank back as he glimpsed the vacuity of the rest of the building. It lay
in wait for him, out here, the force which he had felt busily penetrating his specific apartment.
God, he thought, and reshut the door. He was not ready for the trip up those clanging stairs
to the empty roof where he had no animal. The echo of himself ascending: the echo of
nothing. Time to grasp the handles, he said to himself, and crossed the living room to the
black empathy box.
When he turned it on the usual faint smell of negative ions surged from the power supply;