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

sinister designs on our Earth," you ensured that the reporters
would mention science-fiction.
You also ensured that your opponents had a solid
launching base for ridicule.
But even the newsmagazine Time had refrained from
its almost-compulsory policy of sacrificing truth for the
sake of witty sarcasm. At the end of a series of articles
supposed to devastate MEDIUM and Western, Time had admitted that Western
might be right. Shortly after
this. Carfax had presented his theory. Eager for any explanation
other than the supernatural, Time had then
backed Carfax. Once again, it was attacking Western.
Carfax had stated in his lecture that his theory owed
a certain debt to science-fiction. But it did not derive
from that field of literature any more than space travel
or television did. Men, not books or magazines, had
originated these. Carfax was advocating that scientists
consider all theories to explain the entities which
MEDIUM had contacted. The theory to be developed
first would be the simplest one. And this, according to
Carfax, was the theory that the "spirits" were actually
nonhuman inhabitants of a universe occupying the
same space as ours but "at right angles" to ours. And
these entities, for no good reason, were pretending to
be dead human beings.
Western, via a series of news media interviews, had
asked how these entities had gotten such detailed and
valid knowledge about the people they were supposed
to be impersonating.
5
Carfax had replied, also via the news media, that the
entities probably had always had some means of spying
on us. They had not been able to communicate with us
until MEDIUM opened the way. Or, possibly, they
could have communicated at any time but preferred,
for some reason, that we do it first.
Carfax put down the Times and unfolded the local
morning paper, the Busiris Journal-Star. It contained
an article which capsulized, for the dozenth time, his lecture and the "riot" that
followed. Actually, the "riot"
was a fist fight among six men immediately after a man
was knocked down by a huge, heavily weighted purse
swung by a woman.
It all started when Carfax gave the final lecture in
the Roberta J. Blue Memorial Lecture Series. One stipulation
of the memorial was that the final lecture be
given by a member of the Traybell University faculty.
Moreover, the speaker must talk about a subject outside
his/her specialized field.
Carfax had volunteered to speak. He had, in fact,