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

had different symptoms, every single person. You ever hear of a germ worked like
that? Not me.
Then Tachyon said that sometimes it turned people into freaks instead of killing
them. What kind of freaks? I asked. All kinds, he said. I admitted that it
sounded pretty nasty, and asked him why his folks hadn't used this stuff on the
other families. Because sometimes the virus worked, he said; it remade its
victims, gave them powers. What kinds of powers? All kinds of powers, naturally.
So they had this stuff. They didn't want to use it on their enemies, and maybe
give them powers. They didn't want to use it on themselves, and kill off half
the family.
They weren't about to forget about it. They decided to test it on us. Why us?
Because we were genetically identical to Takisians, he said, the only such race
they knew of, and the bug was designed to work on the Takisian genotype. So why
were we so lucky? Some of his people thought it was parallel evolution, others
believed that Earth was a lost Takisian colony-he didn't know and didn't care.
He did care about the experiment. Thought it was "ignoble." He protested, he
said, but they ignored him. The ship left. And Tachyon decided to stop them all
by himself. He came after them in a smaller ship, burned out his damned tachyon
drive getting here ahead of them. When he intercepted them, they told him to
fuck of, even though he was family, and they had some kind of space battle. His
ship was damaged, theirs was crippled, and they crashed. Somewhere back east, he
said. He lost them, on account of the damage to his ship. So he landed at White
Sands, where he thought he could get help.
I got down the whole story on my wire recorder. Afterwards, Army Intelligence
contacted all sorts of experts: biochemists and doctors and germ-warfare guys,
you name it. An alien virus, we told them, symptoms completely random and
unpredictable. Impossible, they said. Utterly absurd. One of them gave me a
whole lecture about how Earth germs could never affect Martians like in that H.
G. Wells book, and Martian germs couldn't affect us, either. Everybody agreed
that this random-symptom bit was a laugh. So what were we supposed to do? We all
cracked jokes about the Martian flu and spaceman's fever. Somebody, I don't know
who, called it the wild card virus in a report, and the rest of us picked up on
the name, but nobody believed it for a second.
It was a bad situation, and Tachyon just made it worse when he tried to escape.
He almost pulled it off, but like my old man always told me, "almost" only
counts in horseshoes and grenades. The Pentagon had sent out their own man to
question him, a bird colonel named Wayne, and Tachyon finally got fed up, I
guess. He took control of Colonel Wayne, and together they just marched out of
the building. Whenever they were challenged, Wayne snapped off the orders to let
them pass, and rank does have its privileges. The cover story was that Wayne had
orders to escort Tachyon back to Washington. They commandeered a jeep and got
all the way back to the spaceship, but by then one of the sentries had checked
with me, and my men were waiting for them, with direct orders to ignore anything
Colonel Wayne might say. We took him back into custody and kept him there, under
heavy guard. For all his magic powers, there wasn't much he could do about it.
He could make one person do what he wanted, maybe three or four if he tried real
hard, but not all of us, and by then we were wise to his tricks.
Maybe it was a bonehead maneuver, but his escape attempt did get him the date
with Einstein he'd been badgering us for. The Pentagon kept telling us he was
the world's geatest hypnotist, but I wasn't buying that anymore, and you should