"Dick,_Philip_K._The World Jones Made" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

"They're there," Jones said brittlely. "They're all around us. Encircling us. Closing in. Can't you see their plans? Coming across space, century after century... working out their schemes, landing first on Pluto, on Mercury, coming closer all the time. Nearer to the prize: setting up bases for attack."
"Attack," Kaminski repeated softly, cunningly. "You know this? You have proof? Or is this just a wild idea?"
"Six months from this date," Jones stated, his voice pinched and metallic, "the first drifter will land on Earth."
"Our scouts have landed on all the planets," Kaminski pointed out, but his silky assurance was gone. "Does that mean we're invading them?"
"We're there," Jones said, "because those planets are ours. We're looking them over." Raising his eyes, he finished: "And that's what the drifters are doing. They're looking over Earth. Right now, they're looking us over. Can't you feel their eyes on us? Filthy, loathsome, alien, insect eyes..."
Horrified, Cussick said: "He's pathological."
"Can you see this?" Kaminski pursued.
"I know it."
"But you see it? You see an invasion? Destruction? Drifters taking over Earth?"
"Within a year," Jones stated, "there'll be drifters landing everywhere. Every day of the week. Ten here, twenty there. Hordes of them. All identical. Mindless hordes of filthy alien beings."
With an effort, Pearson said: "Sitting next to us in busses, I take it. Wanting to marry our daughters - right?"
Jones must have anticipated the remark; a second before Pearson spoke, the man's face went chalk-white, and he gripped convulsively at the arms of his chair. Fighting with himself, struggling to keep control, he answered between his teeth: "People aren't going to stand for it, friend. I can see that. There's going to be burnings. Those drifters are dry, friend. They burn well. There's going to be lots of cleaning up to do."
Kaminski swore softly, furiously. "Let me out of here," he began saying, to nobody in particular. "I can't stand it."
"Take it easy," Pearson said sharply.
"No, I can't stand it." Futilely, Kaminski paced around in a circle. "There's nothing we can do! We can't touch him-he really sees these things. He's safe from us - and he knows it."

It was early night. Cussick and Pearson stood together in the dark corridor of the top floor of the police offices. A few paces away a dispatch carrier waited, his face bland beneath his steel helmet.
"Well," Pearson began. He shivered. "This hall is cold. Why don't you and your wife come over to my place for dinner? We can talk, sit around, discuss things."
Cussick said: "Thanks, I'd like to. You haven't met Nina."
"I understand you were on leave. Honeymoon?"
"Sort of. We've got a nice little place in Copenhagen... we had started painting it."
"How'd you find a place?"
"Nina's family put their shoulder to the wheel."
"Your wife's not in Security, is she?"
"No. Art and idealism."
"What's she think about you being a cop?"
"She doesn't like it. She wonders if it's necessary. The new tyranny." Ironically, Cussick added: "After all, absolutists are dying out. In a few more years -"
"Do you think Hitler was a precog?" Pearson asked suddenly.
"Yes, I do. Not as developed as Jones, of course. Dreams, hunches, intuitions. The future was fixed for him, too. And he took long chances. I think Jones will begin taking long chances, too. Now that he's beginning to understand what he's here on Earth for."
In Pearson's hand was a flat document. Idly, he tapped it against his fingers. "You know what crazy notion entered my mind? I was going down there where they're holding him, down in that room. I was going to pry open his jaws and drop an A-pellet down his throat. Blow his carcass to fragments. But then I got to thinking."
"He can't be killed," Cussick said.
"He can be killed. But he can't be taken by surprise. To kill Jones would mean bottling him up from all sides. He's got a one-year jump on us. He'll die; he's mortal. Hitler died, finally. But Hitler slithered away from a lot of bullets and poisons and bombs in his time. It'll take a closing ring to do it... a room with no doors. And you can tell by the look on his face that there's still a door."
He called the dispatch carrier over.
"Deliver this personally. You know where - downramp at 45A. Where they've got that skinny dried-up hick."
The carrier saluted, accepted the document, and trotted briskly off.
"You think he believes all that?" Pearson wondered. "About the drifters?"
"Well never know. He's got something big, there. Naturally, they're going to land; they propel themselves randomly, don't they?"
"As a matter of fact," Pearson said, "one has landed already."
"Alive?"
"Dead. Research is working on it. Apparently the secret will stay kept - until the next one."
"Can they tell anything about it?"
"Quite a bit. It's a gigantic, single-celled organism using empty space as a culture medium. It drifts, using some land of vague propulsion mechanism. It's absolutely harmless. It's an amoeba. It's twenty feet wide. It's got some kind of tough rind to keep out the cold. This is no sinister invasion; these poor god damn things just wander mindlessly around."
"What do they eat?"
"They don't. They just go on until they die. There's no feeding mechanism, no digestive process, no excretion, no reproductive apparatus. They're incomplete."
"Odd."
"Apparently, we've run into a swarm of them. Sure, they've started falling. They'll hit here and there, burst apart, smack into cars, flatten themselves out in fields. Foul up lakes and streams. They'll be a pest. They'll stink and flop. More likely, just lie quietly dying. Baking away in the sun... heat killed this one: baked it to a crisp. And meanwhile, people will have something to think about."
"Especially when Jones gets started."
"If it wasn't Jones, it'd be somebody else. But Jones has that talent, that advantage. He can call the shots."
"That document was his release papers, wasn't it?"
"That's right," Pearson said. "He's free. Until we can think up a new law, he's a free man. To do as he pleases."