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

"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. Hell 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."