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

the proper order and context and with the proper preparatory work.
And often, and now more often, Vincent felt that he was touching the
fingers of the secret. And always, when he came near it it had a little bit
of the smell of the Pit.
For he had pegged out all the main points of the history of man, or
rather most of the tenable, or at least possible theories of the history of
man. It was hard to hold the main line of it: that double road of
rationality and revelation that should lead always to a fuller and fuller
development, to an unfolding and growth and perfectibility. Sometimes he
felt that he was trespassing on the history of something other than man.
For the main line of the account was often obscure and all but
obliterated, and traced through fog and miasma. Vincent had accepted the
Fall of Man and the Redemption as the cardinal points of history. But he
began to feel now that neither had happened only once, that both were of
constant recurrence; that there was a hand reaching up from that old Pit
with its shadow over man. And he came to picture that hand in his dreams --
for his dreams were especially vivid when in the state -- as a six-digited
monster reaching out. He began to realize that the thing he was caught in
was dangerous and deadly.
Very dangerous.
 Very deadly.
One of the weird books that he often returned to and which
continually puzzled him was The Relationship of Extradigitalism to Genius,
written by the man whose face he had never seen, in one of his
manifestations.
It promised more than it delivered, and it intimated more than it
said. Its theory was tedious and tenuous, holstered with undigested
mountains of doubtful data. It left Vincent unconvinced that persons of
genius -- even if it could be agreed who or what they were -- had often the
oddity of extra fingers or toes, or the vestiges of them. And it puzzled him
what possible difference it could make.
Yet there were hints here of a Corsican who commonly kept a hand
hidden; of an earlier and more bizarre commander who always wore a mailed
glove; of another man with a glove between the two; hints that the multiplex
adept, Leonardo himself, who sometimes drew the hands of men and more often
those of monsters with six fingers, had had the touch. There was a comment
on Caeser, not conclusive, to the same effect.
It is known that Alexander had a minor deformity. It is not known
what it was. This man made it seem that this was it. And it was averred of
Gregory and Augustine, of Benedict and Albert and Aquinas. Yet a man with a
deformity could not enter the priesthood; if they had it, it must have been
in vestigial form.
There were cases for Charles Magnus and Mahmud, for Saladin the
horseman and for Akhnaton the king; for Homer -- a Seleucid-Greek statuette
shows him with six fingers strumming an unidentified instrument while
reciting; cases for Pythagoras, for Buonottoti, Santi, Theotokopolous, van
Bijn, Robusti. And going farther back in time, and less subject to proof,
they became much more numerous.
Zurbarin cataloged eight thousand of them. He maintained that they
were geniuses. And that they were extra digitals.