"Judith Merril - Beyond Human Ken" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

THE HOUSE DUTIFUL, by William Tenn
PRIDE, by Malcolm Jameson
THE GLASS EYE, by Eric Frank Russell
SOLAR PLEXUS, by James Blish
OUR FAIR CITY, Robert A. Heinlein
THE COMPLEAT WEREWOLF, by Anthony Boucher
THE WABBLER, by Murray Leinster
THE MAN WHO SOLD ROPE TO THE GNOLES, by Idris Seabright
WHAT HAVE I DONE? by Mark Clifton
SOCRATES, by John Christopher
GOOD-BYE, ILHA ! by Laurence Manning
THE PERFECT HOST, by Theodore Sturgeon

William Tenn is perhaps the foremost hu-morist in the science-fantasy field today.
This is not because he is a clever punster (though he is), or a good gag-man (though
he's that, too), or even because he writes "funny" stories. His humor has been called
"Chaplin-esque"; and again, this is not so much be-cause it is similar to Chaplin's
pantomime as because it, too, stems from the author's pecu-liarly compassionate
appreciation of human frailty. Mr. Tenn takes it a step farther, though; his heroes are
not necessarily human. He wrote a side-splitting tearjerker about the problems of an
artificial android "double"; and a sentimental, satirical saga of the seven-sexed
creatures of Venus. Here he treats the dangers of a building animated by the will to
serve.


The House Dutiful

William Tenn

TOтАФTO be . . . an unformable, lonely thought groped blindly for a potential fact . . . need, a
need . . . it wasтАФsomething . . . it wasтАФneeded . . . it was needed? Consci-ousness!
A living creature came with the pride of ownership, the trig-gering wistfulness for it. Unlike its
first darling, this creature had notions that were bizarre and primitive, conceptually ago-nizing.
Painful, painful, painful they were to organize into. But it had purpose againтАФand, more, it had
desireтАФ
Thoughtlessly, lovingly, the immense thing began to flow to the fixed-upon place, twitching
awkward experimental shapes upwards as it went.

The back-country Canadian road was obscure even for the biting concentration of the deluxe 1958
caterpillar runabout,
Metal treads apologized shrilly as they hit a rock that was too large and too smugly imbedded in the
mud. The bright yellow car canted steeply to the right and came down level again with a murky splash.
"And I was so happy in the dairy," Esther Sakarian moaned in histrionic recollection as she dug her
unpainted, thoroughly trimmed fingernails into the lavender upholstery of the front seat. "I had my own
quiet little lab, my neatly labeled samples of milk and cheese from the day's production; at night I could
walk home on cement sidewalks or drop into a dry, air-condi-tioned restaurant or movie. But
Philadelphia wasn't good enough for me! No, I had to . . ."
"Bad storm last nightтАФsmooth riding, usually," Paul Mar-quis muttered on her left. He grimaced his
glasses back into correct nose position and concentrated on the difficult ocular task of separating