"C M Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl - Critical Mass (SS Collection) UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

"What it says in the 'Cyclopedia, Mr. DeBeckett?"
"Why- Yes, if you know it? my dear."
Surprisingly the child said, as if by rote: "The Institute was founded in 1976 and at once attracted most of the great workers in pediatric analysis, who were able to show Wiltshanes's Effect hi the relationship between glandular and mental development. Within less than ten years a new projective analysis of the growth process permitted a reorientation of basic pedagogy from a null-positive locus. The effects were immediate. The first generation of-"
She stopped, startled. The old man was up on his elbow, his eyes blazing at her in wonder and fright. 'Tm-" She looked around at the other children for help and at once wailed, "I'm sorry, Mr. DeBeckett!" and began to cry.
The old man fell back, staring at her with a sort of unbelieving panic. The tittle girl wept abundantly. Slowly DeBeckett's expression relaxed and he managed a sketchy smile.
He said, "There, sweetest. You startled me. But it was charming of you to memorize all that!"
"I learned it for you," she sobbed.
"I didn't understand. Don't cry." Obediently the little girl dried her eyes as DeBeckett stretched out a hand to her.
But the hand dropped back on the quilt. Age, surprise and the drug had allied to overmaster the dwindling resources of Elphen DeBeckett. He wandered to the plantoms on the wall. "I never understood what they did with my money," he told Coppie, who smiled at him with a shy, painted smile. "The children kept coming, but they never said."
"Poor man," said Will absently, watching him with a child's uncommitted look.
The nurse's eyes were bright and wet. She reached for the hypodermic, but the doctor shook his head.
"Wait," he said, and walked to the bed. He stood on tiptoe to peer into the dying man's face. "No, no use. Too old. Can't survive organ transplant, certainty
of cytic shock. No feasible therapy." The nurse's eyes were now flowing. The doctor said to her, with patience but not very much patience, "No alternative. Only kept him going this long from gratitude."
The nurse sobbed, "Isn't there anything we can do for him?"
"Yes." The doctor gestured, and the lights on the diagnostic dials winked out. "We can let him die.?*
Little Pat hiked herself up on a chair, much too large for her, and dangled her feet. "Be nice to get rid of this furniture, anyway," she said. "Well, nurse? He's dead. Don't wait." The nurse looked rebelliously at the doctor, but the doctor only nodded. Sadly the nurse went to the door and admitted the adults who had waited outside. The four of them surrounded the body and bore it gently through the door. Before it closed the nurse looked back and wailed: "He loved you!"
The children did not appear to notice. After a moment Pat said reflectively, "Sorry about the book. Should have opened it."
"He didn't notice," said Will, wiping his hands. He had touched the old man's fingers.
"No. Hate crying, though."
The doctor said, "Nice of you. Helped him, I think." He picked up the phone and ordered a demolition crew for the house. "Monument?"
"Oh, yes," said another child. "Well. Small one, anyway."
The .doctor, who was nine, said, "Funny. Without him, what? A few hundred thousand dollars and the Foundation makes a flexible world, no more rigid adults, no more-" He caught himself narrowly. The doctor had observed before that he had a tendency to over-identify with adults, probably because his specialty had been geriatrics. Now that Elphen DeBeckett was dead, he no longer had a specialty.
"Miss him somehow," said Celine frankly, coming over to look over Will's shoulder at the quaint old
murals on the wall. "What the nurse said, true enough. He loved us."
"And clearly we loved him," piped Freddy, methodically sorting through the contents of the dead man's desk. "Would have terminated him with the others otherwise, wouldn't we?"
A HINT OF HENBANE
This is unlike the other stories in this volume in two respects. First, it isn't science fiction. Second, it wasn't left as an incomplete fragment. It was a finished story, which had somehow gone sour, and never sold. I thought I could see why, so I put it through the typewriter again, and gave it to Bob Mills as agent, and it was published at once in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.
I USED TO THINK, not that it bothered me, that my wife systematically lied to me about her family, but one by one I met them and found it was all true. There was Uncle H______, for one. He earned his unprintable nickname on the day in 1937 when he said to the bank examiner, "Oh, h______!", walked right down to the depot and got on a westbound train, never to return. He sounded like a wish-fumlhnent myth, but two summers ago we drove through Colorado and looked him up. Uncle H._____ was doing fine; brown as a berry, and gave us bear ham out of his own smokehouse for lunch. And, just the way the story went, his shanty was papered with color comics from the Chicago Sunday Tribune.
Uncle Edgar, the salesman, was real too. Sarah claimed that in 1942 he had sold a Wisconsin town on turning over its municipal building to him so he could start a war plant. Well, last year I visited him in his
executive suite, which used to be the mayor's office. He had converted to roller skates. Whenever anyone hinted to him that he might start paying rent or taxes or something he would murmur quietly that he was thinking of moving plant and payroll to Puerto Rico, and then there would be no more hinting for a while.
Grandma and Grandpa were right off the cover of the Saturday Everting Post, rocking and dozing on the porch of their big house. Grandpa, if pressed, would modestly display his bullet scars from the Oklahoma land rush, and Sarah assured me that Grandma had some too. Great Grandmother, pushing the century mark a couple miles down the road, gloomily queened it over five hundred central Ohio acres from her dusty plush bedroom. She had decided in '35 that she would go to bed, and stuck to this decision while suburban housing developments and shopping centers and drive-in movies encroached on the old farm, and the money rolled in. Sarah had a grudging respect for her, though she had seen the will, and it was all going to a Baptist mission hi Naples, Italy.
There was even at last a strained sort of peace between Sarah and her father. He came out of World War I with a D.S.C., a silver plate in his skull and a warped outlook on civilian life. He was a bootlegger throughout most of the twenties. It made for an unpleasant childhood. When it was too late to do the children much good, the V.A. replaced his silver plate with a tantalum plate and he prgmptly enrolled in a theological seminary and wound up a Lutheran pastor hi southern California.
Sarah's attitude toward all this is partly "Judge not lest ye be judged" and partly "What the hell," but of her cousin's husband, Bill Oestreicher, she said dogmatically: "He's a lousy bastard."
We used to see more of bun than of the rest of her family, as an unavoidable side effect of visiting Sarah's Cousin Claire, to whom he was married. Sarah was under some special indebtedness to Cousin Claire.
I think Claire used to take her in during the rough spells with Dad.
On the way to meet them for the first time-they lived in Indiana, an easy drive from Detroit-Sarah told me: 'Try to enjoy the scenery, because you won't enjoy Bill. Did I say you weren't to lend him money or go into any kind of business deal with him?"
"You did."
"And one other thing, don't talk to bun about your own business. Uncle Edgar let him mail a couple of customers' statements for him, and Bill went to the customers offering to undercut Edgar's prices. There was hell's own confusion for a month, and Edgar lost two customers to the Japs. To this day Bill can't understand why Edgar won't talk to him any more."
"I will come out fighting and protect my chin at all tunes."
"You'd better."
Claire was a dark, bird-like little woman with an eager-to-please air, very happy to see Sarah and willing to let some of it splash over onto me. She had just come from work. She was a city visiting nurse and wore a snappy blue cape and hat. Even after eight hours of helping a nineteen-year-old girl fight D.T.'s, she was neat, every hair hi place. I suspected a compulsion. She wore a large, incongruous costume-jewelry sort of ring which I concluded to be a dime-store anniversary present from good old Bill.
Bill's first words to me were: "Glad to meet you, Tommy. Tommy, how much money can you raise in a pinch?" I came out fighting. I've got an automotive upholstery business with a few good accounts. The Ford buyer could rum me overnight by drawing a line through my name on his list, but until that happens I'm solvent. I concealed this from Bill. It was easy. At fifty-odd he was a fat infant. He was sucking on candy sourballs, and when he crunched them up he opened a box of Cracker Jacks. I never saw him when he wasn't munching, gulping, sucking. Beer, gum,
chocolates, pretzels-he was the only person I ever heard of who lapped pretzels-pencils, the ear pieces of his horn-rimmed glasses, the ends of his moustache. Slop, slurp, slop. With his mouth open.
Bill maneuvered me into the kitchen, sucked on a quartered orange and told me he was going to let me in on a can't-miss scrap syndicate which would buy Army surplus and sell it right back to the government at full price. I told him no he wasn't.
His surprise was perfectly genuine. "What do you want to be like that for?" he asked, round-eyed, and went over it again with pencil and paper, sucking on the end of the pencil when he wasn't scribbling with it, and when I said no again he got angry.
"Tommy, what're you being so stupid for? Can't you see I'm just trying to give one of Claire's people a helping hand? Now listen this time, I haven't got all day." My God, what can you do? I told him I'd think about it.
He shook my hand. Between chomps and slurps he said it was a wise decision; if I could pony up, say, five thousand we'd get underway with a rush; had I thought of a second mortgage on my house? "Let's celebrate it," he said. "Claire. Claire, Goddamn it!"
She popped hi. "Case of beer," he said. He didn't even look at her. "The beauty of this, Tommy, is it's Air Force money. Who's going to say no when the Air Force wants to buy something. Tommy, what about borrowing on your insurance?"
Cousin Claire came staggering up from the basement with a case of twenty-four bottles of beer. "Nice and cold," she panted. "From the north corner."
He said, "Giddadahere. Now the markup-" She fluttered out. He turned to the case of beer, and his eyes popped. "How do you like that?" he asked me incredulously. "She didn't open any. She must have thought I wanted to look at beer."