"The Pyramid In The Desert" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

УWheedling aside, it is fair enough. The process is still dangerous. You can call yourself Guinea Pig Number Two. ThatТs fair. We can sign hotel registers G. Igpay and wife. Pardon me, Alec, I digress. It is hard to be practical, darling.

УIf the treatment gets safely out of the lab and into circulationЧrejuvenation worked down to a sort of official vaccination against old ageЧit would be good for the race I think. It may even help evolution. Regeneration would remove environmental handicaps, old scars of bad raising, and give every man a body as good as his genes. A world full of the age proof would be a sort of sound-mind, sound-body health marathon, with the longest breeding period won by the people with the best chromosomes and the healthiest family tradition.

УThank heavens I can strike a blow for evolution at last. Usually I find myself on the opposite side, fighting to preserve the life of some case whose descendants will give doctors a headache.

УAnd look at cultural evolution! For the first time we humans will be able to use our one talent, learning, the way it should be used, the way it was meant to be used from the beginning, an unstoppable growth of skill and humor and understanding, experience adding layer on layer like the bark of a California Redwood.

УAnd we need thinkers with time to boil the huge accumulation of science down to some reasonable size. It is an emergency jobЧand not just for geniuses, the rest of us will have to help look for common denominators, too. Even ordinary specialists will have time to learn more, do some integrating of their own, join hands with specialists of related fields.

УTake us, a good sample of disjointed specialties. You could learn neurology, and I could learn anthropology and psychology, and then we could talk the same language and still be like Jack Spratt and his wife, covering the field of human behavior between us. We would be close enough to collaborateЧwithout many gaps of absolute ignoranceЧto write the most wonderful books. We could evenЕ ahЧWe can evenЧФ

(There was a silence, and then a.shaky laugh.)

УI forgot. I said, СTake us for example,Т as if we werenТt examples already. Research is supposed to be for other people. This is for us. It is a shock. FunnyЧfunny how it keeps taking me by surprise.

УIt shouldnТt make that much difference. After all, one lifetime is like another. WeТll be the same people on the same jobЧwith more time. Time enough to see the sequoias grow, and watch the ripening of the race. A long time.

УBut the outside of the condemned cell is not very different from the inside. It is the same world, full of the same harebrained human beings. And yet here I am, as shaky as if IТve just missed being run over by a truck.Ф

(There was another uncertain laugh.)

УI canТt talk just now, Alec. I have to think.Ф



For some minutes after the record stopped Alec stared out of the window, his hands locked behind his back, the knuckles working and whitening with tension. It was the last record, the only clue he had. The quaver in her voice, her choice of words, had emphatically filled his mind with the nameless emotion that had held her. It was almost a thought, a concept half felt, half seen lying on the borderline of logic.

Before his eyes persistently there grew a vision of the great pyramid of Cheops, half completed, with slaves toiling and dying on its slopes. He stared blindly out over the rooftops of the city, waiting, not daring to force the explanation. Presently the vision began to slip away, and his mind wandered to other thoughts. Somewhere down in that maze of buildings was Helen. Where?

It was no use. Unclenching his stiffening fingers Alec jotted down a small triangle on the envelope of the record, to remind himself that a pyramid held some sort of clue. As he did it, suddenly he remembered that Helen, when she was puzzled, liked to jot the problem down on paper as she thought.

On the bedroom vanity table there was a tablet of white paper, and beside it an ashtray holding a few cigarette stubs. The tablet was blank, but he found two crumpled sheets of paper in the wastebasket and smoothed them carefully out on the table.

It began УDear AlecФ and then there were words crossed and blotted out. УDear AlecФ was written again halfway down the sheet, and the letters absently embroidered into elaborate script. Under it were a few doodles, and then a clear surrealistic sketch of a wisdom tooth marked with neat dental work, lying on its side in the foreground of a desert. Subscribed was the title УTIMEФ, and beside it was written critically, УDerivative: The lone and level sands stretch far away.Ф Doodles and vague figures and faces covered the bottom of the page and extended over the next page. In the midst of them was written the single stark thought, УThere is something wrong.Ф

That was all. Numbly Alec folded the two sheets and put them into the envelope of the record. A tooth and a triangle. It should have been funny, but he could not laugh. He took the record out and considered it. There was another concentric ribbon of sound on the face of the disk. Helen had used it again, but the needle had balked at a narrow blank line where she had restarted the recorder and placed the stylus a little too far in.

He put the record back on the turntable and placed the needle by hand.



УAlec darling, I wish you were here. You arenТt as good a parlor psychologist as any woman, but you do know human nature in a broad way, and can always explain its odder tricks. I thought I was clever at interpreting other peopleТs behavior, but tonight I canТt even interpret my own. Nothing startling has happened. It is just that I have been acting unlike myself all day and I feel that it is a symptom of something unpleasant.

УI walked downtown to stretch my legs and see the crowds and bright lights again. I was looking at the movie stills in a theater front when I saw Lucy Hughes hurrying by with a package under one arm. I didnТt turn around, but she recognized me and hurried over.

У СWhy Helen Berent! I thought you were in Tibet.Т

УI turned around and looked at her. Lucy, with her baby ways and feminine intuition. It would be easy to confide in her but she was not the kind to keep a secret. I didnТt say anything. I suppose I just looked at her with that blank expression you say I wear when I am thinking.