"The World Jones Made" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

"What are you doing these days?" Cussick asked. "You're not with the carnival?"

"I'm a minister of the Honorable Church of God," Jones said, with a wry spasm.

"You look pretty seedy for a minister."

Jones shrugged. "It doesn't pay very well. Right now, not too many people are interested." He added, "But they will be."

"You know, of course," Pearson broke in, "that this whole interview is being taped. Everything you say is going to be played back at the trial."

"What trial?" Jones commented brutally. "Three days from now you're going to release me." Thin face twitching, his voice cold and bleak, he continued thoughtfully, "From now on you're going to be telling a certain parable. I'll tell it, now; pay attention. An Irishman hears that the banks are failing. He runs into the bank where he keeps his money and demands every cent of it. 'Yes sir,' the teller says politely. 'Do you want it in cash or in the form of a check?" The Irishman replies: "Well, if you have it, I don't want it. But if you haven't got it, I must have it immediately.'"

There was an uncomfortable silence. Pearson looked puzzled; he glanced at Cussick. "Am I going to tell that?" he asked doubtfully. "What's it mean?"

"It means," Cussick said, "that nobody's fooling anybody."

Jones smiled in appreciation.

"Am I to infer," Pearson said, his face turning dark and ugly, "that you think we can't do anything to you?"

"I don't think," Jones answered smugly. "I don't have to. That's the point. Do you want my prophecies in cash or in the form of a check? Take your choice."

Thoroughly bewildered, Pearson moved away. "I can't understand him," he muttered. "He's a crackpot; he's out of his mind."

"No," Senior Political Instructor Kaminski said. He had been standing nearby, intently listening. "You're an odd person, Jones," he said to the bony-shanked man standing nervously by the chair. "What I can't understand is this. With your ability, why were you fooling around in that carnival? Why were you wasting your time?"

Jones' answer surprised them all. Its candor, its naked honesty, was a shock. "Because I'm scared," he said. "I don't know what to do. And the awful part is--" He swallowed noisily. "I don't have any choice."

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CHAPTER FIVE


IN KAMINSKI'S office the four of them sat around the desk, smoking, and dully hearing the distant mutter of police guns on their way to the staging area.

"To me," Jones said hoarsely, "this is the past. Right now, with you three, here in this building, this is a year ago. It's not so much like I can see the future; it's more that I've got one foot stuck in the past. I can't shake it loose. I'm retarded; I'm reliving one year of my life forever." He shuddered. "Over and over again. Everything I do, everything I say, hear, experience, I have to grind over twice." He raised his voice, sharp and anguished, without hope. "I'm living the same life two times!"

"In other words," Cussick said slowly, "for you, the future is static. Knowing about it doesn't make it possible for you to change it."

Jones laughed icily. "Change it? It's totally fixed. It's more fixed, more permanent, than this wall." Furiously, he slammed his open palm against the wall behind him. "You think I've some kind of emancipation. Don't kid yourself . . . the less you know about the future the better off you are. You've got a nice illusion; you think you have free will."

"But not you."

"No," Jones agreed bitterly. "I'm trudging along the steps I trudged a year ago. I can't alter a single one of them. This conversation--I know it by heart. Nothing new can come into it; nothing can be left out."

After a moment Pearson spoke up. "When I was a kid," he reflected, "I used to go to movies twice. The second time, it gave me an advantage over the rest of the audience ... I liked it. I could holler out the dialogue a split second before the actors. It gave me a sense of power."