"Theodore Sturgeon - Slow Sculpture" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

was only furniture. It was the man who was worth
watching, the man who kept her occupied so that not
once in all the long time she sat there was she tempted
toward the bookshelves.
At last he finished a long sequence at the bench, threw
some switches, picked up a tall stool and came over to
her. He perched on the stool, hung his heels on the cross-
spoke and lay a pair of long brown hands over his knees.
"Scared."
He made it a statement.
"I suppose I am."
"You don't have to stay."
"Considering the alternative" she began bravely but
the courage-sound somehow oozed out. "It can't matter
much."
"Very sound," he said almost cheerfully. "I remember
when I was a kid there was a fire scare in the apartment
house where we lived. It was a wild scramble to get out
and my tea-year-old brother found himself outside in the
street with an alarm clock in his hand. It was an old one
and it didn't workbut of all the things in the place he
might have snatched up at a time like that, it turned out
to be 'the clock. He's never been able to figure out why."
"Have you?"
"Not why he picked that particular thing--no. But I
think I know why he did something obviously irrational.
You see, panic is a very special state. Like fear and
flight, or fury and attack, it's a pretty primitive reaction
to extreme danger. It's one of the expressions of the will
to survive. What makes it so special is that it's irrational.
Now, why would the abandonment of reason be a sur-
vival mechanism?"
She thought about this seriously. There was that about
this man which made serious thought imperative.
"I can't imagine," she said finally. "Unless it's 'because,
in some situations, reason just doesn't work."
"You can't imagine," he said, again radiating that huge
approval, making her glow. "And you just did. If you are
in danger and you try reason and reason doesn't work
you abandon it. You can't say it's unintelligent to abandon
what doesn't work, right? So then you are in panic. You
start to perform random acts. Most of them--far and
away most will be useless. Some might even be danger-
ous. But that doesn't matter--you're in danger already.
Where the survival factor comes in is that away down
deep you know that one chance in a million is better
than no chance at all. So--here you sit--you're scared and
you could run. Something says you should run but you
won't."
She nodded.