"Henry Kuttner - Humpty Dumpty UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

HUMPTY DUMPTY
AND God said to Noah, the end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them....
Under a stone sky Jeff Cody stood, his hands clasped behind him. He was trying to read the mind of an electronic calculator, and trying to keep his own mind from being read with all the violence in it. He shut down all his barriers around his own desperation, pushing hard upon the one thought he did not dare to face. He held it down, trying to drown it under the surface turmoil of his mind. The calculator had a broad, bland, glassy brow, winking with lights and reflections. Somewhere inside it a thin slice of crystal lay that could wipe human life off the face of the planet. Not Jeff Cody's life, and not the life of his people. But all human, non-telepathic life. The responsiblity for the crystal was one man's. Cody's.
Behind him Allenby shifted from one foot to another, his reflection blurring in the shining surface of the calculator's control panel. Cody said without turning,
"But if the Inductor is a failure, then we'll have to-" An image of death and dying formed like a cloud in his thoughts.
He had not said this aloud. Allenby interrupted very quickly, not speaking aloud either, but his thought cutting into Cody's, ending it before the image of destruction could take full shape in Cody's mind.
"No. We've had another set-back. But we'll try again. We'll keep on trying. We may never have to use-that." His mind sketched in the thin crystal in the calculator, with death for most of the race of man locked in it.
"Call it set-back or call it failure," Cody said, in the silence of his mind. "The goal's too high. Nobody knows what makes a man telepathic. Nobody's ever going to induce it with a jnachine. No Inductor will ever work. You know that."
"I don't know it," Allenby's thought said quietly. "I think it can be done. Jeff, you're under too much pressure."
Cody laughed shortly. "Merriam lasted three months in this job," he said. "Brewster stood it longest-eight months. This is my sixth month. What's the matter? Afraid I'll resign the way Brewster did?"
"No," Allenby said. "But-"
"Okay," Cody interrupted the thought irritably. "Forget it." He felt Allenby's mind touch the edges of his with tentative, uneasy brushing motions. Allenby was a psychologist. And therefore Cody was a little afraid of him. He did not want expert attention brought to bear on him just now. There was something terrifying and yet very tempting down close under the surface of his thoughts, and he did not mean to expose it just yet to anyone. He made an effort of the will and summoned up a shimmer of pleasant images like a smokescreen to puff in Allenby's face. Pine woods with warm rain blowing through them, a quarter of a mile over their heads above the limestone sky. The quiet and clearness of the empty heavens broken only by the buzz of a helicopter and the soft, continual swish of its vanes. The face of Cody's wife when she was hi a good mood and laughing gently.
He felt Allenby's uneasiness tentatively subside. He did not turn as he heard Allenby's feet shift on the floor.
"I'll get back, then," Allenby said without words. "I just wanted to see you when I told you that we'd hit another dead end. Is it all right, Jeff?"
"Fine," Cody said. "I won't keep you."
Allenby went out.
Cody listened while the receding footsteps crossed the room beyond. He heard the door close and lock. He was alone now, physically, though all through the cavern an interlacing play of telepathic thoughts moved continually, touching his own and passing. Even Allenby sent back a vague uneasiness as he moved away. So Cody kept the images of pine woods and clear sky and laughing woman playing over the surface of his mind. But his eyes turned sidewise and without moving his head he saw lying on the edge of a work table within reach of his hand the thing he had not dared to admit into his mind till now. Too many other minds were watching.
What he saw was a knife with a heavy, narrow blade and a sharp point, left by some careless workman. What he thought of was the man before him in this job, and the way Brewster had resigned from it after eight months. Brewster had used a revolver. But a knife was good, too. There is a place inside the collar-bone, near the neck, and consciousness goes out like a blown candle in a matter of seconds if you drive the knife in there. If your burden is too much to bear, as Merriam's was, and Brewster's. And Jeff Cody's.
All around him in the air, like an eyeless, invisible star-
ing, uneasy telepathic minds were swinging around toward him. A ripple of panic was running through the cavern. Something, somewhere, was wrong. But Cody had controlled his surface thoughts skillfully. He had not let himself really see the knife, really think clearly of that spot inside the collarbone, until now.
Now he drew a deep breath and let the wonderful release of the thought flash bright and clear through the cavern. They couldn't stop him. Nobody was near enough. He was free.
"So the Inductor won't work," he said aloud. "So you can't induce telepathy in a human mind. But there's one way to stop telepathy!"
He took one long sidewise step and the knife was in his hand. With two fingers he felt for the ridge of his collarbone, to guide the blade.
"Let the Inductor fail," he thought. "Let the pogrom come. Let the race die. Turn loose Apocalypse. It's not my problem now!"
Generations ago, the Blowup had posed the problem by mutating a sub-species of telepaths. And there had been a time when the Baldies hoped that eugenics could solve that problem. But not any more. Time was too short.
Even though the telepathic function was carried by a dominant gene, there were too few Baldies. Given enough time and enough intermarriage, the world might become peo-. pled entirely by telepaths, but there was not enough time. The only answer was the one which Baldies had been seeking for years now-a mechanical device, an Inductor, which would induce the telepathic power in a non-telepath.
It was theoretically possible. The minds of the greatest scientists on earth lay open to the Baldies. And here in the caves the electronic calculator could solve the problem, given enough data. But this problem it had not completely solved, for there was not enough data, in spite of the treasure of knowledge stolen from hundreds of brilliant, seeking non-Baldy minds.
Still, it was the answer. If every man and woman in the world could become a telepath, simply by wearing a compact mechanical device, the miracle could be worked. The last barriers would go down. The fear and hatred non-telepaths had for Baldies would vanish-not instantly, but it would dissolve little by little in the great sea of interacting minds. The
walls, the difference, would vanish, and with it the fear that relentlessly forced the coming of the pogrom.
But the Inductor was still a theory. The calculator had not yet solved that problem, if it ever would. Instead, it had given the answer to the basic problem in an unexpected way, coldly mechanical and terribly logical. The problem could be solved, the calculator said. Destroy all non-telepathic humans. The method? It searched its vast memory-library and found- Operation Apocalypse.
There was a virus which, by means of certain stimuli, could be mutated into a variant which was air-borne and propagated quickly. It destroyed human neural tissue. There was only one kind of human neural tissue it could not harm. Telepaths were naturally immune to the mutated virus. No Baldy knew what the virus was, or the method of mutation. Only the calculator knew those things, and the inhuman mind of an electronic calculator cannot be read. Somewhere in the great machine was a tiny crystal of barium titanate bearing a series of frozen dots of energy hi a binary digit code. Arid that code held the secret of the deadly virus. If Jeff Cody took three steps forward and sat down in the cushioned operator's chair before the control panel, and if he touched a certain button, a monitor device would examine the electronic pattern of his brain and identify it as surely as fingerprints are identified. Only one man in the world could satisfy the question the monitor would silently ask.
And then a light would begin to glow-somewhere-on the control panel, and under it would be a number, and, seeing that number, Cody could make the calculator reveal its secret. Before Cody, Brewster had carried this crushing burden. And before Brewster, Merriam. And after Cody-someone else would have the unendurable responsibility for deciding whether to say: The end of all flesh is come before me... behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
The crash of protesting minds burst by sheer force through the shell of defense Cody had put up around his own as he took up the knife. From all over the busy cavern telepaths stopped in their tracks and hurled their strong, urgent thoughts toward the interlocked center that was Cody.
It was stunning. He had never felt so strong an impact before. He did not mean to falter, but the burden of their protest was almost tangible, almost a thing to stagger under. Even from above-ground he could hear and feel the instant
thrust of down-driving thought. A quarter of a mile above this limestone sky, above the rock and the soil with the pine tree roots clenched downward through it, a hunter in ragged buckskins paused among the trees and sent his own shocked, sympathetic protest dropping toward the cavern. The thought came blurred to Cody by the stone between, and starred with tiny, bright, brainless thoughts of small burrowing things in the soil overhead.
Someone in a helicopter high up in the hot blue sky locked minds with the group Underground, faint and far-off, but as instant as the man in the nearest cave beyond Cody's locked door.
"No, ho," the voices said in his mind. "You can't! You are all of us. You can't. Jeff, you are all of us!"
He knew it was true. The way out was like a deep, dark well, and vertigo pulled him toward it, but he knew that he would be killing his whole race, a little, if he killed himself. Only telepaths can experience death and still live. Each time a telepath dies, all the rest within mind's reach feel the blackness close upon an extinguished mind, and feel their own minds extinguish a little in response.
It happened so fast Cody was still feeling with two fingers along the edge of his collarbone, and the knife was not yet firm in his fist, when the single, interlocking cry of anguished protest from a hundred minds speaking as one closed down upon him. He shut his thoughts and was obdurate. He could fight them off long enough. This would only take a second. The door was locked and physical force was the only thing that could stop him.
But he was uneasy even in this urgent press of voices and action. For Allenby's mind was not speaking with the rest. Why?
Now the knife was firm in his hand. Now he spread his two fingers apart a little to make way for it, knowing the place to strike. Had Brewster felt as he felt, when Brewster stood here six months ago and laid down the unbearable burden of decision? Had it been hard to pull the trigger? Or easy, as it was easy to lift the knife and-
A burst of blinding white light exploded in the middle of his brain. It was like a shooting star that crashed and shattered upon the very texture of the mind itself. In the last winking instant of consciousness Cody thought he had already struck the self-destroying blow and that this was what death looked like from within.
Then he knew that the meteor of impact was Allenby's mind striking his a numbing blow. He felt the knife slip from his hands, he felt his knees buckle, and he felt nothing more for a very long, an immeasurable time.
When he was aware of himself again Allenby was kneeling beside him on the floor, and the calculator looked up above him glassy and reflecting from an unfamiliar angle, a child's eye view seen with a knee-high vision. The door was unlocked and stood open. Everything looked strange.
Allenby said, "All right, Jeff?"
Cody looked up at him and felt the pent-up and unre-leased tension in him boil toward the surface in an outburst of rage so strong that the supporting minds he felt hovering around him drew back as if from fire.
"I'm sorry," Allenby said. "I've only done that twice before in my life. I had to do it, Jeff."
Cody threw aside the hand on his shoulder. Scowling, he drew his feet under him and tried to rise. The room went around him in an unsteady circle.
"Somebody had to be the man," Allenby said. "It was the odds, Jeff. It's hard on you and Merriam and Brewster and those others, but-
Cody made a violent gesture, cutting off the thought.