"R. A. Lafferty - Stories 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

most intelligent it is a race."
"A race? What race?"
"It is a race between success, which is life, and failure, which is
death."
"Let us skip the melodrama. But how do I get into the state and out
of it?"
"Oh, that is simple, so easy that it seems like a gadget. Here are
two diagrams I will draw. Note them carefully. This first -- invision it in
your mind, and you are in the state. Now the second one -- invision, and you
are out of it."
"That easy?"
"That deceptively easy. The trick is to learn why it works -- if you
want to succeed, meaning to live."
So Charles Vincent left him and went home, walking the mile in a
little less than fifteen seconds. But he still had not seen the face of the
man.

There are advantages intellectual, monetary, and amorous in being
able to enter the accelerated state at will. It is a fox game. One must be
careful not to be caught at it, nor to break or harm that which is in the
normal state.
Vincent could always find eight or ten minutes unobserved to
accomplish the day's work. And a fifteen-minute coffee break could turn into
a fifteen hour romp around the town.
There was this boyish pleasure in becoming a ghost: to appear and
stand motionless in front of an onrushing train and to cause the scream of
the whistle, and to be in no danger, being able to move five or ten times as
fast as the train; to enter and to sit suddenly in the middle of a select
group and see them stare, and then virtually to disappear from the middle of
them; to interfere in sports and games, entering the prize ring and
tripping, hampering, or slugging the unliked fighter; to blue-shot down the
hockey ice, skating at fifteen hundred miles an hour and scoring dozens of
goals at either end while the people only know that something odd is
happening.
There is pleasure in being able to shatter windows by chanting
little songs, for the voice (when in the state) will be to the world at
sixty times its regular pitch, though normal to oneself. And for this reason
also he was inaudible to others.
There was fun in petty thieving and tricks. He could take a wallet
from a man's pocket and be two blocks away when the victim turned at the
feel. He could come back and stuff it into the man's mouth as he bleated to
a policeman.
He could come into the home of a lady writing a letter, snatch up
the paper and write three lines on it and vanish before the scream got out
of her throat.
He could take shoe and sock off a man's foot while he was in full
stride. No human face since the beginning of time ever showed such a look of
pure astonishment as that of the man to whom this first happened.
Discovering oneself half barefoot of a sudden in a crowded street has no
parallel in all experience.