"Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 02 - Necromancer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

with the other white buildings of the Malabar Mine. Above
him the fragile blue of a spring sky spoke to the dark
blue of the deep lake below, which filled this cleft in the
mountain rock. About him in every direction were the
Canadian Rockies, stretching thirty miles in one direc-
tion to the British Columbia city of Kamloops, in the
other to the Coast Range and the stony beaches touching
the salt Pacific Ocean surf. Unexpectedly, he felt them.
Like kings they stood up around him, the mountains.
The surf sounded in his blood, and abruptly he was
growing, striding to meet them. He was mountain-size
with the mountains. With them, he felt the eternal move-
ment of the earth. For a moment he was naked but un-
shaken to the winds of understanding. And they blew to
him one word:
Fear.
Do not go down into the mine.
". . . You will get over this, this sort of thing," the
psychiatrist in San Diego had assured him, five years be-
fore, after the accident. "Now that you've worked it out
for yourself and understand it."
"Yes," said Paul.
It had made sense then, the way he had explained it to
himself under the psychiatrist's guidance. He was an or-
phan, since the time of his parents' simultaneous deaths
in a transportation accident, when he was nine. He had
been assigned to good foster parents, but they were not
the same. He had always been solitary.
He had lacked what the San Diego psychiatrist called
"protective selfishness." He had the knack of understand-
ing people without the usual small urge to turn this un-
derstanding to his own advantage. It had embarrassed
those who might have been his friends, once they un-
derstood this capability in him. They had an instinctive
urge to put a protective distance between himself and
them. Underneath, they feared his knowledge and did not
trust his restraint. As a boy he felt their withdrawal with-
out understanding the reasons behind it. And this, said
the psychiatrist, gave him a false picture of his own situ-
ation.
". . . After all," said the psychiatrist, "this lack of a
desire to take advantage of a capability, amounted to a
 disability. But no worse than any other disability, such
as blindness or loss of a limb. There was no need to feel
that you could not live with it."
But that was the way, it seemed, that unconsciously he
had felt. And that feeling had culminated in an uncon-
scious attempt at suicide.
". . . There's no doubt," said the psychiatrist, "that
you got the bad-weather, small-craft warning put out by