"Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore - Prisoner In The Skull" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

Fowler suddenly remembered his guest and hastily set down his drink. He had avoided that room during the tour of
inspection, managing to put the man completely out of his mind. That was too bad. He could have asked Veronica to
send out a doctor from the village.

But the guest didn't seem to need a doctor. He was working on the wall-switch, at some danger, Fowler thought, of
electrocuting himself. "Look out!" Fowler said sharply. "It's hot!" But the man merely gave him a mild, blank stare and
passed his hand downward before the panel. The light went out.

It came on again, to show the man finishing an upward gesture.

No toggle switch stub protruded from the slot in the center of the plate. Fowler blinked. "WhatтАФ?" he said. Gesture.
Blackout. Another gesture. "What did you do to that?" Fowler asked, but there was no

audible reply.

Fowler drove south through the storm, muttering about ham electricians. Beside him the guest sat, smiling vacantly.
The one thing Fowler wanted was to get the guy off his hands. A doctor, or a cop, in the village, would solve that
particular problem. Or, rather, that would have been the solution, if a minor landslide hadn't covered the road at a
crucial point.

With difficulty Fowler turned the car around and drove back home, cursing gently.

The blank man sat obediently at his side.

They were marooned for three days. Luckily the larder was well-stocked, and the power lines, which ran underground,
weren't cut by the storm. The water-purifying unit turned the muddy stream from outside into crystalline nectar, the
FM set wasn't much bothered by atmospheric disturbances, and Fowler had plenty of assignments to keep him busy at
his drawing board. But he did no drawing. He was exploring a fascinating, though unbelievable, development.

The light switch his guest had rigged was unique. Fowler discovered that when he took the gadget apart. The sealed
plastic had been broken open, and a couple of wires had been rewound in an odd fashion. The wiring didn't make
much sense to Fowler. There was no photo-electric hookup that would have explained it. But the fact remained that he
could turn on the lights in that room by moving his hand upward in front of the switch plate, and reverse the process
with a downward gesture.

He made tests. It seemed as though an invisible fourteen-inch beam extended directly outward from the switch. At any
rate, gestures, no matter how emphatic, made beyond that fourteen-inch distance had no effect on the lights at all.

Curious, he asked his guest to rig up another switch in the same fashion. Presently all the switches in the house were
converted, but Fowler was no wiser. He could duplicate the hookup, but he didn't understand the principle. He felt a
little

frightened.
Locked in the house for three days, he had time to wonder and worry. He fed his guestтАФwho had forgotten the use of
knife and

fork, if he had ever known itтАФand he tried to make the man talk. Not too successfully.

Once the man said: "Forgotten . . . forgottenтАФ"