"C M Kornbluth - Gomez" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

"Is four a.m., por dios. Don't you think you ought to get some sleep?" He looked terrible.

No; he didn't think he ought to get some sleep. He had some work to do. I went downstairs and heard
him pacing overhead for an hour until I dozed off.

This splurge of work didn't wear off in forty-eight hours. For a week I brought him meals and sometimes
he ate absently, with one hand, as he scribbled on a yellow pad. Sometimes I'd bring him lunch to find his
breakfast untouched. He didn't have much beard, but he let it grow for a week-too busy to shave, too
busy to talk, too busy to eat, sleeping in chairs when fatigue caught up with him.

I asked Leitzer, badly worried, if we should do anything about it. He had a direct scrambler-phone
connection with the New York Security and Intelligence office, but his orders didn't cover anything like a
self-induced nervous breakdown of the man he was guarding.

I thought Dr. Mines would do something when he came-call in an M.D., or tell Gomez to take it easy, or
take some of the load off by parceling out whatever he had by the tail.

But he didn't. He went upstairs, came down two hours later, and



absently tried to walk past me. I headed him off into my room. "What's the word?" I demanded.

He looked me in the eye and said defiantly: "He's doing fine. I don't want to stop him."

Dr. Mines was a good man. Dr. Mines was a humane man. And he wouldn't lift a finger to keep the boy
from working himself into nervous prostration. Dr. Mines liked people well enough, but he reserved his
love for theoretical physics. "How important can this thing be?"

He shrugged irritably. "It's just the way some scientists work," he said. "Newton was like that. So was
Sir William Rowan Hamilton-"

"Hamilton-Schmamilton," I said. "What's the sense of it? Why doesn't he sleep or eat?"
Mines said: "You don't know what it's like."

"Of course," I said, getting good and sore. "I'm just a dumb newspaper man. Tell me, Mr. Bones, what
is it like?"

There was a long pause, and he said mildly: "I'll try. That boy up there is using his brain. A great chess
player can put on a blindfold and play a hundred opponents in a hundred games simultaneously,
remembering all the positions of his pieces and theirs and keeping a hundred strategies clear in his mind.
Well, that stunt simply isn't in the same league with what Julio's doing up there.

"He has in his head some millions of facts concerning theoretical physics. He's scanning them, picking out
one here and there, fitting them into new relationships, checking and rejecting when he has to, fitting the
new relationships together, turning them upside down and inside out to see what happens, comparing
them with known doctrine, holding them in his memory while he repeats the whole process and
compares-and all the while he has a goal firmly in mind against which he's measuring all these things." He
seemed to be finished.