"Philip Jose Farmer - Traitor to the Living" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

TRAITOR TO THE LIVING
Philip Jose Farmer
BALLANTINE BOOKS тАв NEW YORK
Copyright ┬й 1973 by Philip Jose Farmer

I.
Gordon Carfax moaned.
He was sitting up in bed and reaching out for
Frances.
The blinds were graying with dawn, and Frances had
left with the night.
There were no fowl in the neighborhood, only barking
dogs, but he was sure, at that moment, that he had
faintly heard a crowing. He had read too much, he told
himself later. Hamlet's ghost and all that. But his explanation
was too soft to turn aside the knife of reason.
Out of the dark grayness, Frances had appeared. The
grayness had swirled, as if it were ectoplasm arranging
itself around her. Slowly, silently, she had been gliding
toward him. Her arms were stretched out to him. She
was unmarked, as he remembered her just before the
accident. She was smiling, but behind the smile was
hurt and anger.
"Frances?" he said. "H only I had known..."
And then the cock had crowed somewhere in his
mind, and Frances, also a mental configuration, had
evaporated. She had not just disappeared; she had
seemed to boil away in little gray clouds.
He lay back sighing and with the breath that followed
he sucked in reality. But weren't dreams a part
of reality?
And wasn't it only through dreams that the dead
could return?
Raymond Western had said that that was not so. No,
give the devil--Western--his due. He had made no
claim that the dead could return. He affirmed only that I
2
they could be located and they could talk with the living.
Western could prove his claims with MEDIUM,
which crouched metallic and humming in his house in
Los Angeles.
Carfax was not alone in dreaming of the dead. The
whole world was dreaming of them; the dreams were
troubled or joyous or frightening, just as the conscious
life of the world was troubled or joyous or frightening.
There was little doubt that MEDIUM could be used
to speak with somethings or somebodies. And many accepted
Western's statements that these entities were
dead human beings.
Gordon Carfax had another explanation, and from