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

he breathed in eagerly, already buoyed up. Then the cathode-ray tube glowed like an
imitation, feeble TV image; a collage formed, made of apparently random colors, trails, and
configurations which, until the handles were grasped, amounted to nothing. So, taking a
deep breath to steady himself, he grasped the twin handles.
The visual image congealed; he saw at once a famous landscape, the old, brown, barren
ascent, with tufts of dried-out bonelike weeds poking slantedly into a dim and sunless sky.
One single figure, more or less human in form, toiled its way up the hillside: an elderly man
wearing a dull, featureless robe, covering as meager as if it had been snatched from the
hostile emptiness of the sky. The man, Wilbur Mercer, plodded ahead, and, as he clutched
the handles, John Isidore gradually experienced a waning of the living room in which he
stood; the dilapidated furniture and walls ebbed out and he ceased to experience them at all.
He found himself, instead, as always before, entering into the landscape of drab hill, drab
sky. And at the same time he no longer witnessed the climb of the elderly man. His own feet
now scraped, sought purchase, among the familiar loose stones; he felt the same old painful,
irregular roughness beneath his feet and once again smelled the acrid haze of the sky Ч not
Earth's sky but that of some place alien, distant, and yet, by means of the empathy box,
instantly available.
He had crossed over in the usual perplexing fashion; physical merging Ч accompanied
by mental and spiritual identification Ч with Wilbur Mercer had reoccurred. As it did for
everyone who at this moment clutched the handles, either here on Earth or on one of the
colony planets. He experienced them, the others, incorporated the babble of their thoughts,
heard in his own brain the noise of their many individual existences. They Ч and he Ч cared
about one thing; this fusion of their mentalities oriented their attention on the hill, the climb,
the need to ascend. Step by step it evolved, so slowly as to be nearly imperceptible. But it
was there. Higher, he thought as stones rattled downward under his feet. Today we are
higher than yesterday, and tomorrow Ч he, the compound figure of Wilbur Mercer, glanced
up to view the ascent ahead. Impossible to make out the end. Too far. But it would come.
A rock, hurled at him, struck his arm. He felt the pain. He half turned and another rock
sailed past him, missing him; it collided with the earth and the sound startled him. Who? he
wondered, peering to see his tormentor. The old antagonists, manifesting themselves at the
periphery of his vision; it, or they, had followed him all the way up the hill and they would
remain until at the top Ч
He remembered the top, the sudden leveling of the hill, when the climb ceased and the
other part of it began. How many times had he done this? The several times blurred; future
and past blurred; what he had already experienced and what he would eventually experience
blended so that nothing remained but the moment, the standing still and resting during which
he rubbed the cut on his arm which the stone had left. God, he thought in weariness. In what
way is this fair? Why am I up here alone like this, being tormented by something I can't even
see? And then, within him, the mutual babble of everyone else in fusion broke the illusion of
aloneness.
You felt it, too, he thought. Yes, the voices answered. We got hit, on the left arm; it hurts
like hell. Okay, he said. We better get started moving again. He resumed walking, and all of
them accompanied him immediately.
Once, he remembered, it had been different. Back before the curse had come, an earlier,
happier part of life. They, his foster parents Frank and Cora Mercer, had found him floating
on an inflated rubber air-rescue raft, off the coast of New England . . . or had it been Mexico,
near the port of Tampico? He did not now remember the circumstances. Childhood had
been nice; he had loved all life, especially the animals, had in fact been able for a time to
bring dead animals back as they had been. He lived with rabbits and bugs, wherever it was,
either on Earth or a colony world; now he had forgotten that, too. But he recalled the killers,