"Julian May - Diamond Mask" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

And it's probably wiser not to think about it.

2

HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH
9 MAY 2062

Nineteen days before the murders would take place in Scotland, at a little past two on Tuesday
morning, Fury prowled the campus of Dartmouth College.
Only an occasional groundcar moved along North College Road in front of the School of
Metapsychology. There were no pedestrians. The elegant buildings of the meta complex were set on a


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wooded slope, where the spring foliage of spreading sugar maples and tall mutant elms gleamed in
the light of old-fashioned iron standard lamps set along paved walkways. At this hour the
buildings themselves were mostly dark. There was a single pair of lighted windows in the office
block and several more in a line on the second floor of the Cerebroenergetic Research Laboratory
further uphill, which had been established less than two years earlier with a generous (and still
controversial) endowment by the Remillard Family Foundation.
For a moment Fury paused to survey the scene. Long ago, before the Great Intervention, a
ramshackle old gray saltbox building scheduled for imminent demolition had given grudging shelter
to the college's infant Department of Metapsychology, and its workers had been regarded with
bemusement and a fair amount of uneasiness by fellow academics of more traditional scholarly
disciplines. These days, the Dartmouth School of Metapsychology was one of the premier research
establishments for higher mindpowers in the Human Polity of the Galactic Milieu, and a favorite
object of Fury's scrutiny.
Tonight the monster's mission was more urgent than usual.
Fury proceeded to insinuate itself into the faculty offices. Its virtual presence was
imperceptible to the senses of normal people, to the metafaculties of operant humans and exotic
beings, and to the sensors of mechanical security systems and janitorial robotics.
In the single lighted suite it found Denis Remillard, Dartmouth's nonagenarian Emeritus
Professor of Metapsychology and living legend, sound asleep at his desk with his blond head
cradled on his arms and his perennially youthful face touched by a gentle smile. He had dozed off
while scribbling annotations on a durofilm printout of a chapter for his latest book, Criminal
Insanity in the Operant Mind. The project had occupied most of the great man's time during the
past five years, for reasons that Fury knew only too well.
The MESSAGE WAITING telltale on the desktop communicator was blinking unheededтАФperhaps with a
plea from the professor's wife, Lucille Carrier, that he come home and go to bed. (Formidable
personality that she was, Lucille would never have dared to disturb her husband's work with a
telepathic summons.) Denis's dreams, Fury noted, were innocuous, even banal, involving the
cultivation of bizarre strains of orchids in his home greenhouse.
The egregious twit!
On another night, Fury might have invaded those dreams to give Denis a personal taste of the
horrors madness might evoke in the metapsychic personality ... but not tonight. There was more
urgent business to attend to.
After scrutinizing the newly written book chapter and sneering at the worst of its
misperceptions, Fury used the professor's computer terminal to access a highly confidential file