"Spider Robinson - Telempath" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

I unclipped one of the remaining incendiary grenades from my beltтАФit comforted me to hold that much raw
power in my handтАФand kept on walking uptown, feeling infinitely more than twenty years old. And as I stalked my
prey through concrete canyons and brownstone foothills, I found myself thinking of his crime, of the twisted motives
that had produced this barren jungle and countless hundreds like it. I remembered my fatherтАЩs eyewitness account of
CarlsonтАЩs actions, repeated so many times during my youth that I could almost recite it verbatim, heard again the
Genesis of the world I knew from its first historianтАФmy father, Jacob Stone. Yes, that Stone, the one man Carlson
never expected to survive, to shout across a smashed planet the name of its unknown assassin. Jacob Stone, who first
cried the name that became a curse, a blasphemy and a scream of rage in the throats of all humankind. Jacob Stone,
who named our betrayer: Wendell Morgan Carlson!
And as I reviewed that grim story, I kept my hand near the rifle with which I hoped to write its happy ending. . . .
 CHAPTER TWO
Excerpts from I Worked With Carlson,
by Jacob Stone, Ph.D., authorized version: Fresh Start Press 1986 (Mimeo)

. . . The sense of smell is a curious phenomenon, oddly resistant to measurement or rigorous analysis. Each life
form on Earth appears to have as much of it as they need to survive, plus a little. The natural human sense of smell,
for instance, was always more efficient than most people realized, so much so that in the 1880s the delightfully
eccentric Sir Francis Galton had actually succeeded, by associating numbers with certain scents, in training himself
to add and subtract by smell, apparently just for the intellectual exercise.
But through a sort of neurological suppressor circuit of which next to nothing is known, most people contrived to
ignore all but the most pleasing or disturbing of the messages their noses brought them, perhaps by way of reaction
to a changing world in which a finely-tuned olfactory apparatus became a nuisance rather than a survival aid. The
level of sensitivity which a wolf requires to find food would be a hindrance to a civilized human packed into a city of
his fellows.
By 1982, Professor Wendell Carlson had raised olfactometry to the level of a precise science. In the course of
testing the theories of Beck and Miles, Carlson almost absentmindedly perfected the classic тАЬblast-injectionтАЭ
technique of measuring differential sensitivity in olfaction, without regard for the subjective impressions of the test
subject. This not only refined his data, but also enabled him to work with life forms other than human, a singular
advantage when one considers how much of the human brain is terra incognita.
His first subsequent experiments indicated that the average wolf utilized his sense of smell on the order of a
thousand times more efficiently than a human. Carlson perceived that wolves lived in a world of scents, as rich and
intricate as our human worlds of sight and word. To his surprise, however, he discovered that the potential sensitivity
of the human olfactory apparatus far outstripped that of any known species.
This intrigued him . . .

. . . Wendell Morgan Carlson, the greatest biochemist ColumbiaтАФand perhaps the worldтАФhad ever seen, was
living proof of the truism that a genius can be a damned fool outside his own specialty.
Genius he unquestionably was; it was not serendipity that brought him the Nobel Prize for isolating a cure for the
entire spectrum of virus infections called тАЬthe common cold.тАЭ Rather it was the sort of inspired accident that comes
only to those brilliant enough to perceive it, fanatic seekers like Pasteur.
But Pasteur was a boor and a braggart,who frittered away valuable time in childish feuds with men unfit to wash
out his test tubes. Genius is seldom a good character reference.
Carlson was a left-wing radical.
Worse, he was the type of radical who dreams of romantic exploits in a celluloid underground: grim-eyed rebels
planting homemade bombs, assassinating the bloated oppressors in their very strongholds and (although he certainly
knew what hydrogen sulfide was) escaping through the city sewers.
 It never occurred to him that it takes a very special kind of man to be a guerilla. He was convinced that the moral
indignation he had acquired at Washington in тАЩ71 (during his undergraduate days) would see him through hardship
and privation, and he would have been horrified if someone had pointed out to him that Che Guevara seldom had
access to toilet paper. Never having experienced hunger, he thought it a glamorous state. He lived a