"Dick, Philip K - Martian Time Slip v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

Manfred, glancing up now and then to peer sightiessly at the landscape around him, had drawn great, flat apartment buildings.
"Look at this, Dad," Jack said, and he managed to keep his voice calm and steady.
Together, the two of them stood behind the boy, watching him draw, watching the buildings become more and more distinct on the paper.
Well, there's no mistaking it, Jack thought. The boy is drawing the buildings that will be here. He is drawing the landscape which will come, not the landscape visible to our eyes.
"I wonder if he saw the photo I showed you," Leo said. "That one of the models."
"Maybe so," Jack said. It would provide an explanation; the boy had understood their conversation, seen the papers, gotten his inspiration from that. But the photo had shown the buildings from above; it was a different perspective from this. The boy had sketched the buildings as they would appear to an observer on the ground. As they would appear, Jack realized, to someone seated where we are right now.
"I wouldn't be surprised if you've got something in this time theory," Leo said. He glanced at his wrist watch. "Now, speaking of time, I'd say--"
"Yes," Jack agreed thoughtfully, "we'll get started back."
There was something more in the child's drawing which he had noticed. He wondered if his father had seen it. The buildings, the enormous co-op apartments, which the boy was sketching, were developing in an ominous direction before their eyes. As they watched, they saw some final details which made Leo glare; he snorted and glanced at his son.
The buildings were old, sagging with age. Their foundations showed great cracks radiating upward. Windows were broken. And what looked like stiff tall weeds grew in the land around. It was a scene of ruin and despair, and of a ponderous, timeless, inertial heaviness.
"Jack, he's drawing a slum!" Leo exclaimed.
That was it, a decaying slum. Buildings that had stood for years, perhaps even decades, which had passed their prime and dwindled into their twilight, into senility and partial abandonment.
Pointing at a yawning crack which he had just drawn, Manfred said, "Gubbish." His hand traced the weeds, the broken windows. Again he said, "Gubbish." He glanced at them, smiling in a frightened way.
"What does that mean, Manfred?" Jack asked.
There was no answer. The boy continued to sketch. And as he sketched, the buildings, before their eyes, grew older and older, more in ruins with each passing moment.
"Let's go," Leo said hoarsely.
Jack took the boy's paper and crayons and got him on his feet. The three of them re-entered the 'copter.
"Look, Jack," Leo said. He was intently examining the boy's drawing. "What he's written over the entrance of the building."
In twisted, wavering letters Manfred had written:

AM-WEB

"Must be the name of the building," Leo said.
"It is," Jack said, recognizing the word; it was a contraction of a co-op slogan, "Alle Menschen werden Br№der." "All men become brothers," he said under his breath. "It's on co-op stationery." He remembered it well.
Now, taking his crayons once more, Manfred resumed his work. As the two men watched, the boy began to draw something at the top of the picture. Dark birds, Jack saw. Enormous, dusky, vulture-like birds.
At a broken window of the building, Manfred drew a round face with eyes, nose, a turned-down, despairing mouth. Someone within the building, gazing out silently and hopelessly, as if trapped within.
"Well," Leo said. "Interesting." His expression was one of grim outrage. "Now, why would he want to draw that? I don't think that's a very wholesome or positive attitude; why can't he draw it like it's going to be, new and immaculate, with children playing and pets and contented people?"
Jack said, "Maybe he draws what he sees."
"Well, if he sees that, he's ill," Leo said. "There are so many bright, wonderful things he could see instead; why would he want to see that?"
"Perhaps he has no choice," Jack said. _Gubbish_, he thought. I wonder; could _gubbish_ mean time? The force that to the boy means decay, deterioration, destruction, and, at last, death? The force at work everywhere, on everything in the universe.
And is that all he sees?
If so, Jack thought, no wonder he's autistic; no wonder he can't communicate with us. A view of the universe that partial--it isn't even a complete view of time. Because time also brings new things into existence; it's also the process of maturation and growth. And evidently Manfred does not perceive time in that aspect.
Is he sick because he sees this? Or does he see this because he is sick? A meaningless question, perhaps, or anyhow one that can't be answered. This is Manfred's view of reality, and according to us, he is desperately ill; he does not perceive the rest of reality, which we do. And it is a dreadful section which he does see: reality in its most repellent aspect.
Jack thought, _And people talk about mental illness as an escape!_ He shuddered. It was no escape; it was a narrowing, a contracting of life into, at last, a moldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came or went; a place of total death.
The poor damned kid, he thought. How can he live from one day to the next, having to face the reality he does?
Somberly, Jack returned to the job of piloting the 'copter. Leo looked out the window, contemplating the desert below. Manfred, with the taut, frightened expression on his face, continued to draw.


They gubbled and gubbled. He put his hands to his ears, but the product crept up through his nose. Then he saw the place. It was where he wore out. They threw him away there, and gubbish lay in heaps up to his waist; gubbish filled the air.
"What is your name?"
"Steiner, Manfred."
"Age."
"Eighty-three."
"Vaccinated against smallpox?"
"Yes."
"Any venereal diseases?"
"Well, a little clap, that's all."
"V.D. clinic for this man."
"Sir, my teeth. They're in the bag, along with my eyes."
"Your eyes, oh yes. Give this man his teeth and eyes before you take him to the V.D. clinic. How about your ears, Steiner?"