"C. L. Moore - Greater Than Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

"Bill, I do believe you're superstitious! Well, we'll fight that out later.
But right now, you're going to make a full report of your success
to the Council, and I'm going to be the proudest wife in the City. And that's
final!"
So the report was made public. It created a tremendous furor; the world
clamored for the magical stuff that would put the molding of the future into
their hands. Bill Cory blushed and grinned for a delighted public in the
telenews screens, promising the great gift soon, and Marta glowed with
vicarious pride.
By the time he had made his first experiment with a human subject, the puppies
which were the result of his first successful mammalian experiment were
beginning to worry him a little. Miss Brown was the first to notice it. She
came in from the kennels one day with a frown behind her steel-rimmed
spectacles.
"Dr. Cory, has someone been training those dogs?"
"Training them?" Bill looked up, puzzled. "Of course not. Why?"
"Well, they've got the makings of the finest trained dogs on Earth. Either the
whole lot of them is exceptionally intelligent or . . . or
something. They just fall over each other obeying every command you can make
clear to them."
Bill straightened from his microscope. "Urn-rn-rn - . . funny. Usually one or
two dogs in a litter are more intelligent and obedient than the rest. But to
have every one in six litters a canine genius is something pretty queer. What
do you make of it?"
"I wouldn't call it genius, exactly. As I say, I'm not sure if it's unusual
intelligence or. . . well, maybe a strong strain of obedience, or lack of
initiative, or. . . it's too soon to say. But they're not normal dogs, Dr.
Cory."


It was too soon to say. Tests simply showed the pups to be extraordinarily
amenable to training, but what quality in them made this so was difficult to
determine. Bill was not sure just what it implied, but an 'uneasiness in him
woke and would not be quieted.
The first "X-ray" babies began to be born. Without exception they were fine,
strong, healthy infants, and without exception of the predetermined sex. The
Council was delighted; the parents were delighted; everyone was delighted
except Bill. The memory of those oddly obedient pups haunted him- Within three
years the Cory System was available to the public.
The experimental babies had made such an excellent showing that, in the end,
Bill gave in to the insistent world, though something in the recesses of his
mind urged delay. Yet he couldn't explain it. The
babies were all healthy, normal, intelligent children. Unusually amenable to
authority, yes, but that was an asset, not a liability.
Presently all over the world the first crops of Cory System babies began to
appear, and gradually Bill's misgivings faded. By then Bill Junior had arrived
to take his mind off other people's childr~nr but even now he was obscurely
glad that little Bill was a boy on his own initiative, not because his parents
had forced masculinity upon him. There was no rhyme or reason to Bill's queer
obsession that his own child should not be a product of the X-ray system, but