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

He artificially synthesized the substances he had isolated, and in doing so
sloughed away a great many useless components. He pursued the subject along
the lines of radiations and vibrations. He discovered something in the longer reds
which, when projected through a vessel full of air vibrating in the supersonics, and
then polarized, speeded up the heartbeat of small animals twenty to one.
They ate twenty times as much, grew twenty times as fast, and-died twenty times
sooner than they should have.
Kidder built a huge hermetically sealed room. Above it was another room, the
same length and breadth but not quite as high. This was his control chamber. The
large room was divided into four sealed sections, each with its individual
miniature cranes and derricks-handling ma-chinery of all kinds. There were also
trapdoors fitted with air locks leading from the upper to the lower room.
By this time the other laboratory had produced a warm-blooded, snake-skinned
quadruped with an astonishingly rapid life cycle-a generation every eight days, a
life span of about fifteen. Like the echidna, it was oviparous and mammalian. Its
period of gestation was six hours; the eggs hatched in three; the young reached
sexual maturity in another four days. Each female laid four eggs and lived just
long enough to care for the young after they hatched. The male generally died two
or three hours after mating. The creatures were highly adaptable. They were
small- not more than three inches long, two inches to the shoul-der from the
ground. Their forepaws had three digits and a triple-jointed, opposed thumb. They
were attuned to life in an atmosphere, with a large ammonia content. Kidder bred
four of the creatures and put one group in each section of the sealed room.
Then he was ready. With his controlled atmospheres he varied temperatures,
oxygen content, humidity. He killed them off like flies with excesses of, for
instance, carbon dioxide, and the survivors bred their physical resistance into the
next generation. Periodically he would switch the eggs from one sealed section to
another to keep the strains varied. And rapidly, under these controlled conditions,
the creatures began to evolve.
This, then, was the answer to his problem. He couldnтАЩt speed up mankindтАЩs
intellectual advancement enough to have it teach him the things his incredible
mind yearned for. He couldnтАЩt speed himself up. So he created a new race-a race

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which would develop and evolve so fast that it would surpass the civilization of
man; and from them he would learn.
They were completely in KidderтАЩs power. EarthтАЩs normal atmosphere would
poison them, as he took care to demonstrate to every fourth generation. They
would make no attempt to escape from him. They would live their lives and
progress and make their little trial-and-error experi-ments hundreds of times faster
than man did. They had the edge on man, for they had Kidder to guide them. It
took man six thousand years really to discover science, three hundred to put it to
work. It took KidderтАЩs creatures two hundred days to equal manтАЩs mental
attainments. And from then on-KidderтАЩs spasmodic output made the late, great
Tom Edison look like a home handicrafter.
He called them Neoterics, and he teased them into working for him. Kidder was
inventive in an ideological way; that is, he could dream up impossible