"George R. R. Martin - WC 1 - Wild Cards" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

fingers, five toes, two balls, and one cock. The fucker was no different from
you and me. He spoke English, for crissakes. But get this-he also spoke German.
And Russian and French and a few other languages I've forgotten. I made wire
recordings of a couple of my sessions with him, and played them for a linguist,
who said the accent was Central European.
And the headshrinkers, whoa, you should have heard their reports. Classic
paranoid, they said. Megalomania, they said. Schitzo, they said. All kinds of
stuff. I mean, look, this guy claimed to be a prince from outer space with magic
fucking powers who'd come here all alone to save our whole damned planet. Does
that sound sane to you?
And let me say something about those damned magic powers of his. I'll admit it,
that was the thing that bothered me the most. I mean, not only could Tachyon
tell you what you were thinking, he could look at you funny and make you jump up
on your desk and drop your pants, whether you wanted to or not. I spent hours
with him every day, and he convinced me. The thing was, my reports didn't
convince the brass back east. Some kind of trick, they thought, he was
hypnotizing us, he was reading our body posture, using psychology to make us
think he read minds. They were going to send out a stage hypnotist to figure out
how he did it, but the shit hit the fan before they got around to it.
He didn't ask much. All he wanted was a meeting with the President so he could
mobilize the entire American military to search for some crashed rocket ship.
Tachyon would be in command, of course, no one else was qualified. Our top
scientists could be his assistants. He wanted radar and jets and submarines and
bloodhounds and weird machines nobody had ever heard of. You name it, he wanted
it. And he did not want to have to consult with anybody, either. This guy
dressed like a fag hairdresser, if you want the truth, but the way he gave
orders you would've thought he had three stars at least.
And why? Oh, yeah, his story, that sure was great. On this planet Takis, he
said, a couple dozen big families ran the whole show, like royalty, except they
all had magic powers, and they lorded it over everybody else who didn't have
magic powers. These families spent most of their time feuding like the Hatfields
and McCoys. His particular bunch had a secret weapon they'd been working on for
a couple of centuries. A tailored artificial virus designed to interact with the
genetic makeup of the host organism, he said. He'd been part of the research
team.
Well, I was humoring him. What did this germ do? I asked him. Now get this-it
did everything.
What it was supposed to do, according to Tachyon, was goose up these mind powers
of theirs, maybe even give them some new powers, evolve 'em almost into gods,
which would sure as hell give his kin the edge over the others. But it didn't
always do that. Sometimes, yeah. Most often it killed the test subjects. He went
on and on about how deadly this stuf was, and managed to give me the creeps.
What were the symptoms? I asked. We knew about germ weapons back in 46; just in
case he was telling the truth, I wanted us to know what to look for.
He couldn't tell me the symptoms. There were all kinds of symptoms. Everybody


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