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

"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."

"It 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."

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CHAPTER SIX


IN THE TINY, white-gleaming, ascetic police cell, Jones stood swabbing the inside of his mouth with Dr. Sherrif's Special Throat Tonic. The tonic was bitter and unpleasant. He rolled it from cheek to cheek, held it in the upper portion of his trachea for a moment, and then spat it into the porcelain washbowl.

Without comment, the two uniformed policemen, one at each end of the chamber, watched. Jones paid no attention to them; peering into the mirror over the bowl, he scrupulously combed his hair. Then he rubbed the side of his thumb over his teeth. He wanted to be in shape; in an hour he was going to be involved in important matters.

For a moment he tried to remember what came immediately ahead. The release notice was due, or so he thought It was so long ago; one whole year had passed and details lad blurred. Vaguely, he had memory of a cop entering with something, a paper of some kind. That was it: that was the release. And after that came a speech.

The speech was still clear in his mind; he hadn't forgotten it. Annoyance came, as he thought about it. Giving the same words again, repeating the same gestures. The old mechanical actions . . . stale events, dry and dusty, sagging under the smothering blanket of dull age.

And meanwhile, the living wave flashed on.

He was a man with his eyes in the present and his body in the past. Even now, as he stood examining his grubby clothes, smoothing his hair, rubbing his gums, even as he stood here in the antiseptic police cell, his senses were glued tight on another scene, a world that still danced with vitality, a world that hadn't become stale. Much had happened in the next year. And as he scraped peevishly at his bearded chin, plucking at an old rash, the wave uncovered new moments, new excitements and events.

The wave of the future was washing up incredible shells for him to examine.

Impatiently, he strode to the door of the chamber and peered out. That was what he hated; that was the loathsome thing. The molasses of time: it couldn't be hurried. On it dragged, with weary, elephantine steps. Nothing could urge it faster: it was monstrous and deaf. Already, he had exhausted the next year; he was totally tired of it. But it was going to take place anyhow. Whether he liked it or not--and he didn't--he was going to have to relive each inch of it, re-experience in body what he had long ago known in mind.

Such had been happening all his life. The misphasing had always existed. Until he was nine years old, he had imagined that every human being endured duplication of all waking instants. At nine, he had lived out eighteen years. He was exhausted, disgusted, and fatalistic. At nine and a half years, he discovered that he was the only individual so burdened. From then on, his resignation rapidly became raging impatience.

He was born in Colorado, August 11, 1977. The war was still in progress, but it had by-passed the American Middle West. The war had not by-passed Greeley, Colorado; it had never come there. No war could reach into every town, to every living human being. The farm which his family maintained continued almost as usual; a self-sufficient economic unit, it carried on with its stagnant routine, ignorant of and indifferent to the crisis of mankind.

First memories were bizarre. Later, he had attempted to untangle them. The languid foetus had entertained impressions of a notyet world; as he crouched curled up in his mother's bloated womb, a phantasmagoria, incomprehensible and vivid, had swirled around him. Simultaneously, he had lain in the bright sunshine of a Colorado autumn and dreamed quietly in the black moist sack, the dripping all-provider. He had known birth terror before he was conceived; by the time the embryo was a month old, the trauma was long in the past. The actual event of birth was of no significance to him; as he was swung suspended from the doctor's fist, he had already been in the world one full year.

They wondered why the new baby failed to cry. And why his learning process was so rapid.

Once, he had conjectured this way: what was the real moment of his origin? At what point in time had he really come into being? Floating in the womb, he had clearly been alive, sentient. To what had the first memories come? One year before birth, he had not been a unit, not even a zygote; the elements that comprised him had not come together. And by the time the fertilized egg had begun to divide, the wall had carried well beyond the moment of birth: three months into the hot, dusty, bright Colorado fall.

It was a mystery. He finally stopped thinking about it.

In his early years of childhood he had accepted his dual existence, learned to integrate the two continua. The process had not been easy. For months he had laboriously crept head-on into doors, furniture, walls. He had reached for a spoon of Pablum one year hence; he had fretfully declined a nipple long ago forgotten. Confusion had virtually starved him to death; he had been force-fed, and forcibly prevented from wandering out of existence. Naturally, it was assumed that he was feeble-minded. A baby that groped for invisible objects, that tried to put its hands through the side of its crib . . .