"Damon Knight - Four in one (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

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Four In One
By Damon Knight (1953)

George Meister had once seen the nervous system of a man--a display specimen, achieved by
coating the smallest of the fibers until they were coarse enough to be seen, then dissolving all
the unwanted tissue and replacing it with clear plastic. A marvelous job; that fellow on Torkas
III had done it--what was his name? At any rate: having seen the specimen, Meister knew
approximately what he himself must look like at the present moment.
Of course, there were distortions: for example, he was almost certain that the neurons between
his visual center and his eyes had produced themselves by at least thirty centimeters. Also, no
doubt, the system as a whole was curled up and spread out rather oddly, since the
musculature it had originally controlled was gone; and he had noticed certain other changes which
might or might not be reflected by gross structural differences. The fact remained that he--all
that he could still call _himself_--was nothing more than a brain, a pair of eyes, a spinal cord,
and a spray of neurons.
George closed his eyes for a second. It was a thing he had learned to do only recently, and he
was proud of it. That first long period, when he had had no control whatever, had been very bad,
He had decided later that the paralysis had been due to the lingering effects of some anaesthetic--
the agent, whatever it was, that had kept him unconscious while his body was being--Well.
Either that, or the neuron branches had simply not yet knitted firmly in their new positions.
perhaps he could verify one or the other supposition at some future time. But at first, when he
had only been able to see and not to move, knowing nothing beyond the moment when he had fallen
face first into that mottled green and brown puddle of gelatin... that had been upsetting.
He wondered how the others were taking it. There were others, he knew, because occasionally he
would feel a sudden acute pain down where his legs belonged, and at the same instant the motion of
the landscape would stop with a jerk. That could only be same other brain, trapped like his,
trying to move their common body in another direction.
Usually the pain stopped immediately, and George could go on sending messages down to the nerve
endings which had formerly belonged to his fingers and toes, and the gelatinous body would keep on
creeping slowly forward. When the pains continued, there was nothing to do but to stop moving
until the other brain quit--in which case George would feel like an unwilling passenger in a very
slow vehicle--or try to alter his own movements to coincide, or at least product: a vector with
the other brain's.
He wondered who else had fallen in--Vivian Bellis? Major Gumbs? Miss McCarty? Or all three of
them? There ought to be some way of finding out.
He tried looking down once more, and was rewarded with a blurry view of a long, narrow strip of
mottled green and brown, moving very slowly forward along the dry stream bed they had been
crossing for the last hour or more. Twigs and shreds of dry vegetable matter were stuck to the
dusty, translucent surface.
He was improving; the last time, he had only been able to see the thinnest possible edge of his
new body.
When he looked up again, the far edge of the stream bed was perceptibly closer. There was a
cluster of stiff-looking, dark-brown vegetable shoots just beyond, on the rocky shoulder; George
was aiming slightly to the left of it. It had been a plant very much like that one that he'd been
reaching for when he lost his balance and got himself into this condition. He might as well have a
good look at it, anyhow.
The plant would probably turn out to be of little interest. It would be out of all reason to
expect every new life form to be a startling novelty; and George was convinced that he had already