"Carol Emshwiller - Childhood of the Human Hero (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emshwiller Carol)

the ends and he'll be smiling.

Say, did you know there's a new method that can give you powerful muscles you'll be proud to show
your friends in just ten minutes a day? "Carry your great strength with prudence and humility," I
say, but you've broken another ballpoint pen writing the answer to the problem of Farmer Brown who
plows half an acre in twenty minutes and Farmer Jones who has plowed thirty-two acres in seventy-
six hours.

He's coming in, going out, coming in, going out. It's another world entirely outside and that
waltz is really the original motion-picture soundtrack from 2001.

I know you. I was a boy once myself, mother though I have become, and I know it might as well be,
maybe ought to be Chichen Itza instead of Betelgeuse or some place with a lot of moons. You'll
lose all that, you know, Captain, next year or the year after, but there will be greater losses,
and that sonic blast was just a stalling tactic to keep you busy while they roll in this monstrous
world. You have yet to face the bureaucratic creatures that crawl through rocks and can hold you


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helplessly imprisoned in megaliths even Though you may be in telepathic contact with the big
brained friends of this universe. There are things you'd never suspect out here in reality land,
and your night terrors are nothing compared to them.

You won't recognize him. I mean that man with the yellow/brown mustache coming in for a landing on
some different planet farther in the future than you ever thought possible. He's of the next
century, you know, and will be at his peak by 2001. Did you realize that yesterday when you asked
me, "What does
`existential' mean?" and I couldn't answer so you knew? "Forget it," you said and I can't forget
it, because without your existential super self you will certainly perish in wars of the future
out among the satellites, overcome by cosmic thought patterns too convoluted for the human brain
to contemplate, or, if not that, torn apart by humanoids in the death throes of their own identity
crises, or exploded by technological advances available not only to the future but known already
to the present and, if not one or more of the above, inevitably coarsened by Earthlings of your
own kind. I can't save you, because even though thunder sends the cats under the bed and still
brings you into my room where there can be no ghosts, no tigers, and monsters still shrivel up and
die when I turn on the lights, my powers are fading. But I'm not-repeat, not-waiting for you to
grow up, because that's another thing entirely.

"What's the size of a shark's brain?"

"What's the capital of Colorado?"

"What's the longest book ever written?"

"What's green and warty and lives at the bottom of the sea?"

For Mother, on Mother's Day, draw space ships.