"Stanislaw Lem - Ijon Tichy 02 - Memoirs of a Space Traveler" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

prematurely. Mankind was to harness nuclear energy only as the synthesis of the hydrogen nuclei into the
helium, and since that is more difficult, the discovery could not be expected before the twenty-first
century. Roth, however, brought the uranides back into the project. Unfortunately, I was unable to prove
that he had been put up to this by agents of a certain imperialist intelligence agency in connection with
plans of military supremacy. . . The man ought to have been tried for genocide; but for him the Japanese
cities would not have been bombed in World War II.
The second "expert" in this select trio, Cipher, had finished medical school, but his license to
practice was revoked for numerous violations. Cipher handled the biological side and made suitable
"improvements" in it. My own reasoning had gone as follows. The world is the way it is, and mankind
behaves the way it does, because everything arose by chance, that is, haphazardly, through the initial
violation of fundamental laws. One has but to reflect a moment to see that under such conditions things
could be worse! The determining factor, after all, was randomness -- the "Creator" being the fluctuational
caprice of Nothingness, which contracted a monstrous and nightmarish debt by inflating, without rhyme
or reason, the metagalactic bubble!
I recognized, to be sure, that certain features of the Universe could be left as they were, with a
little touching up and correction, so I filled in what was needed. But as far as Man went, ah, there I
became radical. I crossed out all his vileness with one stroke. The foliation I mentioned above, which
replaced body hair, would have helped establish a new ethics, but Mr. Cipher thought hair more
important. He "missed" it, you see. One could make such nice fringes, whiskers, and other fancy things
with it. On the one hand, my morality of fellowship and humanism; on the other, the value system of a
hairdresser! I assure you, you would not know yourselves if it hadn't been for Lou Cipher, who copied
back into the electron from a cassette all the hideous features that you behold in the mirror.
Finally, as for Lab Assistant Bunch, though he was not capable of doing anything himself, he
demanded that his cronies immortalize his part in the Creation of the World. He wanted -- and I shudder
as I write this -- he wanted his name to be visible from every corner of the firmament. When Roth
explained to him that stars cannot form permanent monograms or letters, because of their movements,
Bunch desired that they at least be grouped in large clusters, or bunches. This, too, was done.
On October 20, when I placed my finger on the button of the console, I had no idea what I was
actually creating. It came to light a couple of days later, when we were checking the tapes and
discovered what had been recorded, by the vile trio, in our positron. The professor was crushed. As for
me, I did not know whether to blow out my brains or someone else's. Eventually reason prevailed over
anger and despair, because I knew that nothing could be changed now. I did not even take part in the
interrogation of the miscreants who had befouled the world I created. Professor Tarantoga told me about
half a year later that the three intruders had played in the Creation a role that religion usually assigned to
Satan. I shrugged. What sort of Satan did those three asses make? But the blame is mine; I was careless
and left my post. If I wanted to look for excuses, I could say the culprit was the Bombay pharmacist who
sold me, instead of decent mosquito repellent, an oil that attracted them as honey does bees. But in this
way you could blame God-knows-whom for the flaws in existence. I do not intend to defend myself thus:
I am responsible for the world as it is and for all human failing, since it was in my power to make both
better.




The Twenty-fourth Voyage

On day 1,006, having left the local system of the Nereid Nebula, I noticed a spot on the screen
and tried rubbing it off with a chamois cloth. There was nothing else to do, so I spent four hours rubbing
before I realized that the spot was a planet and rapidly growing larger. Circling this heavenly body, I was
not a little surprised to find that its vast continents were covered with regular patterns and geometric