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

propositions providing he didnтАЩt have to work them out. For example, he wanted
the Neoterics to figure out for themselves how to build shelters out of porous
material. He created the need for such shelters by subjecting one of the sections to
a high-pressure rainstorm which flattened the inhabitants. The Neoterics promptly
devised waterproof shelters out of the thin waterproof material he piled in one
corner.
Kidder immediately blew down the flimsy structures with a blast of cold air. They
built them up again so that they resisted both wind and rain. Kidder lowered the
tempera-ture so abruptly that they could not adjust their bodies to it. They heated
their shelters with tiny braziers. Kidder promptly turned up the beat until they
began to roast to death. After a few deaths, one of their bright boys fig-ured out
how to build a strong insulant house by using three-ply rubberoid, with the middle
layer perforated thou-sands of times to create tiny air pockets.
Using such tactics, Kidder forced them to develop a highly advanced little culture.
He caused a drought in one section and a liquid surplus in another, and then
opened the partition between them. Quite a spectacular war was fought, and
KidderтАЩs notebooks filled with information about military tactics and weapons.
Then there was the vaccine they developed against the common cold-the reason
why that affliction has been absolutely stamped out in the world today, for it was
one of the things that Co-nant, the bank president, got hold of. He spoke to Kidder
over the radiophone one winter afternoon with a voice so hoarse from laryngitis

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that Kidder sent him a vial of vac-cine and told him briskly not to ever call him
again in such a disgustingly inaudible state. Conant had it analyzed and again
KidderтАЩs accounts and the bankтАЩs swelled.
At first, Kidder merely supplied the materials he thought they might need, but
when they developed an intelligence equal to the task of fabricating their own
from the ele-ments at hand, he gave each section a stock of raw mate-rials. The
process for really strong aluminum was devel-oped when he built in a huge
plunger in one of the sec-tions, which reached from wall to wall and was designed
to descend at the rate of four inches a day until it crushed whatever was at the
bottom. The Neoterics, in self-defense, used what strong material they had in hand
to stop the inexorable death that threatened them. But Kidder had seen to it that
they had nothing but aluminum oxide and a scattering of other elements, plus
plenty of electric power. At first they ran up dozens of aluminum pillars; when
these were crushed and twisted they tried shaping them so that the soft metal
would take more weight. When that failed they quickly built stronger ones; and
when the plunger was halted, Kidder removed one of the pillars and analyzed it. It
was hardened aluminum, stronger and tougher than molybdenum steel.
Experience taught Kidder that he had to make certain changes to increase his
power over the Neoterics before they got too ingenious. There were things that
could be done with atomic power that he was curious about; but he was not
willing to trust his little superscientists with a thing like that unless they could be
trusted to use it strictly ac-cording to Hoyle. So he instituted a rule of fear. The
most trivial departure from what he chose to consider the right way of doing
things resulted in instant death of half a tribe. if he was trying to develop a Diesel-