"Lewis Padgett - When the Bough Breaks 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Padgett Lewis)

"Angle the power," Bordent told him.
Alexander said, "Modjewabba?"
"What's that?" Myra asked in a strained voice. "Super language?"
Bordent smiled at her. "No, just baby talk."
Alexander burst into sobs. Myra said, "Super baby or not, when he cries like that, there's a good reason. Does your tutoring extend to that point?"
"Certainly," Quat said calmly. He and Finn carried Alexander out. Bordent smiled again.
"You're beginning to believe," he said. "That helps." Calderon drank, feeling the hot fumes of whiskey along the backs of his cheeks. His stomach was crawling with cold uneasiness.
"If you were human-" he said doubtfully.
"If we were, we wouldn't be here. The old order changeth. It had to start sometime. Alexander is the first homo superior."
"But why us?" Myra asked.
"Genetics. You've both worked with radioactivity and certain short-wave radiations that effected the germ plasm. The mutation just happened. It'll happen again from now on. But you happen to be the first. You'll die, but Alexander will live on. Perhaps a thousand years."
Calderon said, "This business of coming from the future... you say Alexander sent you?"
"The adult Alexander. The mature superman. It's a different culture, of course-beyond your comprehension. Alexander is one of the X Frees. He said to me, through the interpreting-machine, of course, 'Bordent, I wasn't recognized as a super till I was thirty years old. I had only ordinary homo sap development till then. I didn't know my potential myself. And that's bad.' It is bad, you know," Bordent digressed. "The full capabilities of an organism can't emerge unless it's given the fullest chance of expansion from birth on. Or at least from infancy. Alexander said to me, 'It's about five hundred years ago that I was born. Take a few guides and go into the past. Locate me as an infant. Give me specialized training, from the beginning. I think it'll expand me.' "
"The past," Calderon said. "You mean it's plastic?"
"Well, it affects the future. You can't alter the past without altering the future, too. But things tend to drift back. There's a temporal norm, a general level. In the original time sector, Alexander wasn't visited by us. Now that's changed. So the future will be changed. But not tremendously. No crucial temporal apexes are involved, no keystones. The only result will be that the mature Alexander will have his potential more fully realized."


Alexander was carried back into the room, beaming. Quat resumed his lesson with the egg beater.
"There isn't a great deal you can do about it," Bordent said. "I think you realize that now."
Myra said, "Is Alexander going to look like you?" Her face was strained.
"Oh, no. He's a perfect physical specimen. I've never seen him, of course, but-"
Calderon said, "Heir to all the ages. Myra, are you beginning to get the idea?"
"Yes. A superman. But he's our baby."
"He'll remain so," Bordent put in anxiously. "We don't want to remove him from the beneficial home and parental influence. An infant needs that. In fact, tolerance for the young is an evolutionary trait aimed at providing for the superman's appearance, just as the vanishing appendix is such a preparation. At certain eras of history mankind is receptive to the preparation of the new race. It's never been quite successful before-there were anthropological miscarriages, so to speak. My squeevers, it's important! Infants are awfully irritating. They're helpless for a very long time, a great trial to the patience of the parents- the lower the order of the animal, the faster the infant develops. With mankind, it takes years for the young to reach an independent state. So the parental tolerance increases in proportion. The superchild won't mature, actually, till he's about twenty."
Myra said, "Alexander will still be a baby then?"
"He'll have the physical standards of an eight-year-old specimen of homo sap. Mentally... well, call it irrationality. He won't be leveled out to an intellectual or emotional norm. He won't be sane, any more than any baby is. Selectivity takes quite a while to develop. But his peaks will be far, far above the peaks of, say, you as a child."
"Thanks," Calderon said.
"His horizons will be broader. His mind is capable of grasping and assimilating far more than yours. The world is really his oyster. He won't be limited. But it'll take a while for his mind, his personality, to shake down."
"I want another drink," Myra said.
Calderon got it. Alexander inserted his thumb in Quat's eye and tried to gouge it out. Quat submitted passively.
"Alexander!" Myra said.
"Sit still," Bordent said. "Quat's tolerance in this regard is naturally higher developed than yours."
"If he puts Quat's eye out," Calderon said, "it'll be just too bad."
"Quat isn't important, compared to Alexander. He knows it, too."
Luckily for Quat's binocular vision, Alexander suddenly tired of his new toy and fell to staring at the egg beater again. Dobish and Finn leaned over the baby and looked at him. But there was more to it than that, Calderon felt.
Induced telepathy," Bordent said. "It takes a long time to develop, but we're starting now. I tell you, it was a relief to hit the right time at last. I've rung this doorbell at least a hundred times. But never till now-"
"Move," Alexander said clearly. "Real. Move."
Bordent nodded. "Enough for today. We'll be here again tomorrow. You'll be ready?"
"As ready," Myra said, "as we'll ever be, I suppose." She finished her drink.
They got fairly high that night and talked it over. Their arguments were biased by their realization of the four little men's obvious resources. Neither doubted any more. They knew that Bordent and his companions had come from five hundred years in the future, at the command of a future Alexander who had matured into a fine specimen of superman.
"Amazing, isn't it?" Myra said. "That fat little blob in the bedroom turning into a twelfth-power Quiz Kid."
"Well, it's got to start somewhere. As Bordent pointed out."
"And as long as he isn't going to look like those goblins-ugh!"
"He'll be super. Deucalion and what's-her-name-that's us. Parents of a new race."
"I feel funny," Myra said. "As though I'd given birth to a moose."
"That could never happen," Calderon said consolingly. "Have another slug."
"It might as well have happened. Alexander is a swoose."
"Swoose?"
"I can use that goblin's doubletalk, too. Vopishly wog-gle in the grand foyer. So there."
"It's a language to them," Calderon said.