"Theodore Sturgeon - Microcosmic God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

mind, many things having nothing to do with the problem at hand, and very little
of what he wanted. But he piled that little on what little he knew or guessed, and
in time had quite a collection of known factors to work with. His approach was
characteristically unorthodox. He did things on the order of multiplying apples by

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MICROCOSMIC GOD


pears, and balancing equations by adding log V-i to one side and ┬░┬░ to the other.
He made mistakes, but only one of a kind, and later, only one of a species. He
spent so many hours at his microscope that he had quit work for two days to get
rid of a hallucination that his heart was pumping his own blood through the mike.
He did nothing by trial and error because he disapproved of the method as sloppy.
And he got results. He was lucky to begin with and even luckier when he
formularized the law of probability and reduced it to such low terms that he knew
almost to the item what experiments not to try. When the cloudy, viscous
semifluid on the watch glass began to move itself he knew he was on тАШthe right
track. When it began to seek food on its own he began to be excited. When it
divided and, in a few hours, redivided, and each part grew and divided again, he
was triumphant, for he had created life.
He nursed his brain children and sweated and strained over them, and he designed
baths of various vibrations for them, and inoculated and dosed and sprayed them.
Each move he made taught him the next And out of his tanks and tubes and
incubators came amoebalike creatures, and then ciliated animalcules, and more
and more rapidly he produced animals with eye spots, nerve cysts, and then-
victory of victories-a real blastopod, possessed of many cells instead of one. More
slowly he developed a gastropod, but once he had it, it was not too difficult for
him to give it organs, each with a specified function, each inheritable.
Then came cultured molluskilke things, and creatures with more and more
perfected gills. The day that a non-descript thing wriggled up an inclined board
out of a tank, threw flaps over its gills and feebly breathed air, Kidder quit work
and went to the other end of the island and got disgustingly drunk. Hangover and
all, he was soon back in the lab, forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep, tearing into
his problem.
He turned into a scientific byway and ran down his other great triumph-
accelerated metabolism. He extracted and refined the stimulating factors in
alcohol, cocoa, heroin, and Mother NatureтАЩs prize dope runner, cannabis indica.
Like the scientist who, in analyzing the various clotting agents for blood
treatments, found that oxalic acid and oxalic acid alone was, the active factor,
Kidder isolated the accelerators and decelerators, the stimulants and soporifics, in
every substance that ever undermined a manтАЩs morality and/or caused a тАЬnoble
experiment.тАЭ In тАШthe process he found one thing he needed badly-a colorless elixir

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MICROCOSMIC GOD


that made sleep the unnecessary and avoidable waster of time it should be. Then
and there he went on a twenty-four-hour shift.