"William Tenn - Child's Play" - читать интересную книгу автора (William Tenn)

At nine that night he squatted next to the Combination Electron Microscope and Workbench and began opening certain small bottles. At nine forty-seven Sam Weнber made his first simple living thing.
It wasn't much, if you used the first chapter of Genesis as your standard. Just a primitive brown mold that, in the field of the microscope, fed diffidently on a piece of pretzel, put forth a few spores and died in about twenty minutes. But he had made it. He had constructed a specific life-form to feed on the constituents of a specific pretzel; it could survive nowhere else.
He went out to supper with every intention of getting drunk. After just a little alcohol, however, the dei-ish feeling returned and he scurried back to his room.
Never again that evening did he recapture the exultation of the brown mold, though he constructed a giant protein molecule and a whole slew of filterable viruses.
He called the office in the little corner drugstore which was his breakfast nook. "I'll be home all day," he told Tina.
She was a little puzzled. So was Lew Knight, who grabbed the phone. "Hey, counнselor, you building up a neighborhood practice? Kid Blackstone is missing out on a lot of cases. Two ambulances have already clanged past the building."
"Yeah," said Sam. "I'll tell him when he comes in."
The weekend was almost upon him, so he decided to take the next day off as well. He wouldn't have any real work till Monday when the Somerset & Ojack basket would produce his lone egg.
Before he returned to his room, he purchased a copy of an advanced bacteriology. It was amusing to constructЧwith improvements!Чunicellular creatures whose very place in the scheme of classification was a matter for argument among scientists of his own day. The Bild-A-Man manual, of course, merely gave a few examples and general rules; but with the descriptions in the bacteriology, the world was his oyster.
Which was an idea: he made a few oysters. The shells weren't hard enough, and he couldn't quite screw his courage up to the eating point, but they were most undeniнably bivalves. If he cared to perfect his technique, his food problem would be solved.
The manual was fairly easy to follow and profusely illustrated with pictures that expanded into solidity as the page was opened. Very little was taken for granted; inнvolved explanations followed simpler ones. Only the allusions were occasionally obscureЧ"This is the principle used in the phanphophlink toys," "When your teeth are next yokekkled or demortoned, think of the Bacterium cyanogenum and the humble part it plays," "If you have a rubicular mannikin around the house, you needn't bother with the chapter on mannikins."
After a brief search had convinced Sam that whatever else he now had in his apartнment he didn't have a rubicular mannikin, he felt justified in turning to the chapter on mannikins. He had conquered completely this feeling of being Pop playing with Junior's toy train: already he had done more than the world's top biologists ever dreamed of for the next generation and what might not lie aheadЧwhat problems might he not yet solve?
"Never forget that mannikins are constructed for one purpose and one purpose only." I won't, Sam promised. "Whether they are sanitary mannikins, tailoring manнnikins, printing mannikins or even sunevviarry mannikins, they are each constructed with one operation of a given process in view. When you make a mannikin that is capable of more than one function, you are committing a crime so serious as to be punishable by public admonition."
"To construct an elementary mannikinЧ"
It was very difficult. Three times he tore down developing monstrosities and beнgan anew. It wasn't till Sunday afternoon that the mannikin was completeЧor rather, incomplete.
Long arms it hadЧalthough by an error, one was slightly longer than the otherЧa faceless head and a trunk. No legs. No eyes or ears, no organs of reproduction. It lay on his bed and gurgled out of the red rim of a mouth that was supposed to serve both for ingress and excretion of food. It waved the long arms, designed for some one simple operation not yet invented, in slow circles.
Sam, watching it, decided that life could be as ugly as an open field latrine in midsummer.
He had to disassemble it. Its lengthЧthree feet from almost boneless fingers to tapering, sealed-off trunkЧprecluded the use of the tiny disassembleator with which he had taken apart the oysters and miscellaneous small creations. There was a bright yellow notice on the large diassembleator, howeverЧ"To be used only under the direct supervision of a Census Keeper. Call formula A76 or unstable your id."
"Formula A76" meant about as much as "sunevviarry," and Sam decided his id was already sufficiently unstabled, thank you. He'd have to make out without a Cenнsus Keeper. The big disassembleator probably used the same general principles as the small one.
He clamped it to a bedpost and adjusted the focus. He snapped the switch set in the smooth underside.
Five minutes later the mannikin was a bright, gooey mess on his bed.
The large disassembleator, Sam was convinced as he tidied his room, did require the supervision of a Census Keeper. Some sort of keeper anyway. He rescued as many of the legless creature's constituents as he could, although he doubted he'd be using the set for the next fifty years or so. He certainly wouldn't ever use the disassembleator again; much less spectacular and disagreeable to shove the whole thing into a meat grinder and crank the handle as it squashed inside.
As he locked the door behind him on his way to a gentle binge, he made a mental note to purchase some fresh sheets the next morning. He'd have to sleep on the floor tonight.
Wrist-deep in Somerset & Ojack minutiae, Sam was conscious of Lew Knight's stares and Tina's puzzled glances. If they only knew, he exulted! But Tina would probнably just think it "marr-vell-ouss!" and Lew Knight might make some crack like "Hey! Kid Frankenstein himself." Come to think of it, though, Lew would probably have worked out some method of duplicating, to a limited extent, the contents of the Bild-A-Man set and marketing it commercially. Whereas heЧwell, there were other things you could do with the gadget. Plenty of other things.
"Hey, counselor," Lew Knight was perched on the corner of his desk, "what are these long weekends we're taking? You might not make as much money in the law, but does it look right for an associate of mine to sell magazine subscriptions on the side?"
Sam stuffed his ears mentally against the emery-wheel voice. "I've been writing a book."
"A law book? Weber On Bankruptcy?"
"No, a juvenile. Lew Knight, The Neanderthal Nitwit"
"Won't sell. The title lacks punch. Something like Knights, Knaves and Knobheads is what the public goes for these days. By the way, Tina tells me you two had some sort of understanding about New Year's Eve and she doesn't think you'd mind if I took her out instead. I don't think you'd mind either, but I may be prejudiced. Especially since I have a table reservation at Cigale's where there's usually less of a crowd of a New Year's Eve than at the Automat."
"I don't mind."
"Good," said Knight approvingly as he moved away. "By the way, I won that case. Nice juicy fee, too. Thanks for asking."
Tina also wanted to know if he objected to the new arrangements when she brought the mail. Again, he didn't. Where had he been for over two days? He had been busy, very busy. Something entirely new. Something important.
She stared down at him as he separated offers of used cars guaranteed not to have been driven over a quarter of a million miles from caressing reminders that he still owed half the tuition for the last year of law school and when was he going to pay it?
Came a letter that was neither bill nor ad. Sam's heart momentarily lost interest in the monotonous round of pumping that was its lot as he stared at a strange postmark: Glunt City, Ohio.

Dear Sir:
There is no firm in Glunt City at the present time bearing any name similar to "Bild-A-Man Company" nor do we know of any such organization planning to join our little community. We also have no thoroughfare called "Diagonal"; our north-south streets are named after Indian tribes while our east-west avenues are listed numerically in multiples of five.
Glunt City is a restricted residential township; we intend to keep it that. Only small retailing and service establishments are permitted here. If you are interested in building a home in Glunt City and can furnish proof of white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon ancestry on both sides of your family for fifteen generations, we would be glad to furnish further information.
Thomas H. Plantagenet, Mayor.

P.S. An airfield for privately owned jet and propeller-driven aircraft is being built outside the city limits.

That was sort of that. He would get no refills on any of the vials and bottles even if he had a loose slunk or two with which to pay for the stuff. Better go easy on the maнterial and conserve it as much as possible. But no disassembling!
Would the "Bild-A-Man Company" begin manufacturing at Glunt City some time in the future when it had developed into an industrial metropolis against the conнstricted wills of its restricted citizenry? Or had his package slid from some different track in the human time stream, some era to be born on an other-dimensional Earth? There would have to be a common origin to both, else why the English wordage? And could there be a purpose in his having received it, beneficialЧor otherwise?
Tina had been asking a question. Sam detached his mind from shapeless speculaнtion and considered her quite-the-opposite features.
"So if you'd still like me to go out with you New Year's Eve, all I have to do is tell Lew that my mother expects to suffer from her gallstones and I have to stay home. Then I think you could buy the Cigale reservations from him cheap."
"Thanks a lot, Tina, but very honestly I don't have the loose cash right now. You and Lew make a much more logical couple anyhow."
Lew Knight wouldn't have done that. Lew cut throats with carefree zest. But Tina did seem to go with Lew as a type.
Why? Until Lew had developed a raised eyebrow where Tina was concerned, it had been Sam all the way. The rest of the office had accepted the fact and moved out of their path. It wasn't only a question of Lew's greater success and financial well-being: just that Lew had decided he wanted Tina and had got her.
It hurt. Tina wasn't special; she was no cultural companion, no intellectual equal; but he wanted her. He liked being with her. She was the woman he desired, rightly or wrongly, whether or not there was a sound basis to their relationship. He rememнbered his parents before a railway accident had orphaned him: they were theoretiнcally incompatible, but they had been terribly happy together.