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

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 guestЧwho had forgotten the use of knife and

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

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

"You haven't forgotten how to be an electrician. Where did you come from?"

The blank face turned to him. "Where?" A pause. And thenЧ

"When? Time . . . timeЧ"

Once he picked up a newspaper and pointed" questioningly at the date lineЧthe year.

"That's right," Fowler said, his stomach crawling. "What year did you think it was?''

"WrongЧ" the man said. "ForgottenЧ"

Fowler stared. On impulse, he got up to search his guest's pockets. But there were no pockets. The suit was ordinary, though slightly strange in cut, but it had no pockets.

"What's your name?"

"No answer.

"Where did you come from? AnotherЧtime?"

Still no answer.

Fowler thought of robots. He thought of a soulless world of the future peopled by automatons. But he knew neither was the right answer. The man sitting before him was horribly normal. And empty, somehowЧdrained. Normal?

The norm? That non-existant, figurative symbol which would be monstrous if it actually appeared? The closer an individual approaches the norm, the more colorless he is. Just as a contracting line becomes a point, which has few, if any, distinguishing characteristics. One point is exactly like another point. As though humans, in some unpleasant age to come, had been reduced to the lowest common denominator.

The norm.

"All right," Fowler said. "I'll call you Norman, till you remember your right name. But you can't be a ... point. You're no moron. You've got a talent for electricity, anyhow."

Norman had other talents, too, as Fowler was to discover soon. He grew tired of looking through the window at the gray, pouring rain, pounding down over a drenched and dreary landscape, and when he tried to close the built-in Venetian shutters, of course they failed to work. "May that architect be forced to live in one of his own houses," Fowler said, and, noticing Norman made explanatory gestures toward the window.

Norman smiled blankly.

"The view," Fowler said. "I don't like to see all that rain. The shutters won't work. See if you can fix them. The viewЧ"

He explained patiently, and presently Norman .went out to the unit nominally called a kitchen, though it was far more efficient. Fowler shrugged and sat down at his drawing board. He looked up, some while later, inline to see Norman finish up with a few swabs of cloth. Apparently he had been painting the window