"Philip Jose Farmer - 1952-1964" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

depressed, but he got worse the day a so-called friend told Eddie that whenever Polina heard his name
mentioned, she laughed loud and long. The friend added that Polina had promised to tell someday the
true story of their brief merger.

That night his mother had to call in a doctor.

In the days that followed, she thought of giving up her position as research pathologist at De Kruif and
taking all her time to help him тАЬget back on his feet.тАЭ It was a sign of the struggle going on in her mind that
she had not been able to decide within a weekтАЩs time. Ordinarily given to swift consideration and
resolution of a problem, she could not agree to surrender her beloved quest into tissue regeneration.

Just as she was on the verge of doing what was for her the incredible and the shameful, tossing a coin,
she had been vised by her superior. He told her she had been chosen to go with a group of biologists on
a research cruise to ten preselected planetary systems.

Joyfully, she had thrown away the papers that would turn Eddie over to a sanatorium. And, since he was
quite famous, she had used her influence to get the government to allow him to go along. Ostensibly, he
was to make a survey of the development of opera on planets colonized by Terrans. That the yacht was
not visiting any colonized globes seemed to have been missed by the bureaus concerned. But it was not
the first time in the history of a government that its left hand knew not what its right was doing.

Actually, he was to be тАЬrebuiltтАЭ by his mother, who thought herself much more capable of curing him than
any of the prevalent A, F, J, R, S, K, or H therapies. True, some of her friends reported amazing results
with some of the symbol-chasing techniques. On the other hand, two of her close companions had tried
them all and had gotten no benefits from any of them. She was his mother; she could do more for him
than any of those тАЬalphabattiesтАЭ; he was flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood. Besides, he wasnтАЩt so
sick. He just got awfully blue sometimes and made theatrical but insincere threats of suicide or else just
sat and stared into space. But she could handle him.

2

So now it was that she followed him from the backward-running clock to his room. And saw him step
inside, look for a second, and then turn to her with a twisted face.

тАЬNeddie is ruined, mother. Absolutely ruined.тАЭ
She glanced at the piano. It had torn loose from the wallracks at the moment of impact and smashed itself
against the opposite wall. To Eddie it wasnтАЩt just a piano; it was Neddie. He had a pet name for
everything he contacted for more than a brief time. It was as if he hopped from one appellation to the
next, like an ancient sailor who felt lost unless he was close to the familiar and designated points of the
shoreline. Otherwise, Eddie seemed to be drifting helplessly in a chaotic ocean, one that was anonymous
and amorphous.

Or, analogy more typical of him, he was like the nightclubber who feels submerged, drowning, unless he
hops from table to table, going from one well-known group of faces to the next, avoiding the featureless
and unnamed dummies at the strangersтАЩ tables.

He did not cry over Neddie. She wished he would. He had been so apathetic during the voyage.
Nothing, not even the unparalleled splendor of the naked stars nor the inexpressible alien-ness of strange
planets had seemed to lift him very long. If he would only weep or laugh loudly or display some sign that
he was reacting violently to what was happening. She would even have welcomed his striking her in anger