"Henry Kuttner - The Piper's Son UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

In the end, sick and nauseated, Burkhalter let Al go and
sat alone on the bench, watching the red light die on the snowy peaks. The whiteness was red-stained. But it was not too late. The man was a fool, had been a fool from the beginning, or he would have known the impossibility of attempting such a thing as this.
The conditioning had only begun. Al could be reconditioned. Burkhalter's eyes hardened. And would be. And would be. But not yet, not until the immediate furious anger had given place to sympathy and understanding.
Not yet.
He went into the house, spoke briefly to Ethel, and televised the dozen Baldies who worked with him in the Publishing Center. Not all of them had families, but none was missing when, half an hour later, they met in the back room of the Pagan Tavern downtown. Sam Shane had caught a fragment of Burkhalter's knowledge, and all of them read his emotions. Welded into a sympathetic unit by their telepathic sense, they waited till Burkhalter was ready.
Then he told them. It didn't take long, via thought. He told them about the Japanese jewel-tree with its glittering gadgets, a shining lure. He told them of racial paranoia and propaganda. And that the most effective propaganda was sugar-coated, disguised so that the motive was hidden.
A Green Man, hairless, heroic-symbolic of a Baldy.
And wild, exciting adventures, the lure to catch the young fish whose plastic minds were impressionable enough to be led along the roads of dangerous madness. Adult Baldies could listen, but they did not; young telepaths had a higher threshold of mental receptivity, and adults do not read the books of their children except to reassure themselves that there is nothing harmful in the pages. And no adult would bother to listen to the Green Man mindcast. Most of them had accepted it as the original daydream of their own children.
"I did," Shane put in. "My girls-"
"Trace it back," Burkhalter said. "I did."
The dozen minds reached out on the higher frequency, the children's wavelength, and something jerked away from them, startled and apprehensive.
"He's the one," Shane nodded.
They did not need to speak. They went out of the Pagan Tavern in a compact, ominous group, and crossed the street to the general store. The door was locked. Two of the men burst it open with their shoulders.
They went through the dark store and into a back room where a man was standing-beside an overturned chair. His bald skull gleamed in an overhead light. His mouth worked impotently.
His thought pleaded with them-was driven back by an implacable deadly wall.
Burkhalter took out his dagger. Other slivers of steel glittered for a little while-
And were quenched.
Venner's scream had long since stopped, but his dying thought of agony lingered within Burkhalter's mind as he walked homeward. The wigless Baldy had not been insane, no. But he had been paranoidal.
What he had tried to conceal, at the last, was quite shocking. A tremendous, tyrannical egotism, and a furious hatred of nontelepaths. A feeling of self-justification that was, perhaps, insane. And-we are the Future! The Baldies! God made us to rule lesser men!
Burkhalter sucked in his breath, shivering. The mutation had not been entirely successful. One group had adjusted, the Baldies who wore wigs and had become fitted to their environment. One group had been insane, and could be discounted; they were in asylums.
But the middle group were merely paranoid. They were not insane, and they were not sane. They wore no wigs.
Like Venner.
And Venner had sought disciples. His attempt had been foredoomed to failure, but he had been one man.
One Baldy-paranoid.
There were others, many others.
Ahead, nestled into the dark hillside, was the pale blotch that marked Burkhalter's home. He sent his thought ahead, and it touched Ethel's and paused very briefly to reassure her.
Then it thrust on, and went into the sleeping mind of a little boy who, confused and miserable, had finally cried himself to sleep. There were only dreams in that mind now, a little discolored, a little stained, but they could be cleansed. And would be.