"William Tenn - Null-P" - читать интересную книгу автора (William Tenn)

Null-P
William Tenn

Several months after the Second Atomic War, when radioactivity still held one-third of the planet in desolation, Dr. Daniel Glurt of Fillmore Township, Wisc., stumbled upon a discovery which was to generate humanity's ultimate sociological advance.
Like Columbus, smug over his voyage to India; like Nobel, proud of the synthesis of dynamite which made combat between nations impossible, the doctor misinterнpreted his discovery. Years later, he cackled to a visiting historian:
"Had no idea it would lead to this, no idea at all. You remember, the war had just ended: we were feeling mighty subdued what with the eastern and western coasts of the United States practically sizzled away. Well, word came down from the new capital at Topeka in Kansas for us doctors to give all our patients a comнplete physical check. Sort of be on the lookout, you know, for radioactive burns and them fancy new diseases the armies had been tossing back and forth. Well, sir, that's absolutely all I set out to do. I'd known George Abnego for over thirty yearsЧtreated him for chicken-pox and pneumonia and ptomaine poisoning. I'd never suspected!"
Having reported to Dr. Glurt's office immediately after work in accordance with the proclamation shouted through the streets by the county clerk, and having waited patiently in line for an hour and a half, George Abnego was at last received into the small consulting room. Here he was thoroughly chest-thumped, X-rayed, blood-sampled, and urinanalyzed. His skin was examined carefully, and he was made to answer the five hundred questions prepared by the Department of Health in a paнthetic attempt to cover the symptoms of the new ailments.
George Abnego then dressed and went home to the cereal supper permitted for that day by the ration board. Dr. Glurt placed his folder in a drawer and called for the next patient. He had noticed nothing up to this point; yet already he had unwittingly begun the Abnegite Revolution.
Four days later, the health survey of Fillmore, Wisc., being complete, the doctor forwarded the examination reports to Topeka. Just before signing George Abnego's sheet, he glanced at it cursorily, raised his eyebrows and entered the following note: "Despite the tendency to dental cavities and athlete's foot, I would consider this man to be of average health. Physically, he is the Fillmore Township norm."
It was this last sentence which caused the government medical official to chuckle and glance at the sheet once more. His smile was puzzled after this; it was even more puzzled after he had checked the figures and statements on the form against stanнdard medical references.
He wrote a phrase in red ink in the right-hand corner and sent it along to Research.
His name is lost to history.
Research wondered why the report on George Abnego had been sent upЧhe had no unusual symptoms portending exotic innovations like cerebral measles or arteнrial trichinosis. Then it observed the phrase in red ink and Dr. Glurt's remark. Reнsearch shrugged its anonymous shoulders and assigned a crew of statisticians to go further into the matter.
A week later, as a result of their findings, another crewЧnine medical specialнistsЧleft for Fillmore. They examined George Abnego with coordinated precision. Afterwards, they called on Dr. Glurt briefly, leaving a copy of their examination reнport with him when he expressed interest.
Ironically, the government copies were destroyed in the Topeka Hard-Shelled Baptist Riots a month later, the same riots which stimulated Dr. Glurt to launch the Abnegite Revolution.
This Baptist denomination, because of population shrinkage due to atomic and bacteriological warfare, was now the largest single religious body in the nation. It was then controlled by a group pledged to the establishment of a Hard-Shelled Bapнtist theocracy in what was left of the United States. The rioters were quelled after much destruction and bloodshed; their leader, the Reverend Hemingway T. GauntЧwho had vowed that he would remove neither the pistol from his left hand nor the Bible from his right until the Rule of God had been established and the Third Temple builtЧwas sentenced to death by a jury composed of stern-faced fellow Baptists.
Commenting on the riots, the Fillmore, Wisc., Bugle-Herald drew a mournful parallel between the Topeka street battles and the destruction wreaked upon the world by atomic conflict.
"International communication and transportation having broken down," the editorial went on broodingly, "we now know little of the smashed world in which we live beyond such meager facts as the complete disappearance of Australia beneath the waves, and the contraction of Europe to the Pyrenees and Ural Mountains. We know that our planet's physical appearance has changed as much from what it was ten years ago, as the infant monstrosities and mutants being born everywhere as a result of radioactivity are unpleasantly different from their parents.
"Truly, in these days of mounting catastrophe and change, our faltering spirits beg the heavens for a sign, a portent, that all will be well again, that all will yet be as it once was, that the waters of disaster will subside and we shall once more walk upon the solid ground of normalcy."
It was this last word which attracted Dr. Glurt's attention. That night, he slid the report of the special government medical crew into the newspaper's mail slot. He had penciled a laconic note in the margin of the first page:
"Noticed your interest in the subject."
Next week's edition of the Fillmore Bugle-Herald flaunted a page one five-column headline.

FILLMORE CITIZEN THE SIGN?
Normal Man of Fillmore May Be Answer From Above
Local Doctor Reveals Government Medical Secret

The story that followed was liberally sprinkled with quotations taken equally from the government report and the Psalms of David. The startled residents of Fillmore learned that one George Abnego, a citizen unnoticed in their midst for almost forty years, was a living abstraction. Through a combination of circumstances no more remarkable than those producing a royal flush in stud poker, Abnego's physique, psyche, and other miscellaneous attributes had resulted in that legendary creatureЧthe statistical average.
According to the last census taken before the war, George Abnego's height and weight were identical with the mean of the American adult male. He had married at the exact ageЧyear, month, dayЧwhen statisticians had estimated the marriage of the average man took place; he had married a woman the average number of years younger than himself; his income as declared on his last tax statement was the averнage income for that year. The very teeth in his mouth tallied in quantity and condiнtion with those predicted by the American Dental Association to be found on a man extracted at random from the population. Abnego's metabolism and blood pressure, his bodily proportions and private neuroses, were all cross-sections of the latest availнable records. Subjected to every psychological and personality test available, his final, overall grade corrected out to show that he was both average and normal.
Finally, Mrs. Abnego had been recently delivered of their third child, a boy. This development had not only occurred at exactly the right time according to the popuнlation indices, but it had resulted in an entirely normal sample of humanityЧunнlike most babies being born throughout the land.
The Bugle-Herald blared its hymn to the new celebrity around a greasy photograph of the family in which the assembled Abnegos stared glassily out at the reader, lookнing, as many put it, "AverageЧaverage as hell!"
Newspapers in other states were invited to copy.
They did, slowly at first, then with an accelerating, contagious enthusiasm. Inнdeed, as the intense public interest in this symbol of stability, this refugee from the extremes, became manifest, newspaper columns gushed fountains of purple prose about the "Normal Man of Fillmore."
At Nebraska State University, Professor Roderick Klingmeister noticed that many members of his biology class were wearing extra-large buttons decorated with picнtures of George Abnego. "Before beginning my lecture," he chuckled, "I would like to tell you that this 'normal man' of yours is no Messiah. All he is, I am afraid, is a bell-shaped curve with ambitions, the median made fleshЧ"
He got no further. He was brained with his own demonstration microscope.
Even that early, a few watchful politicians noticed that no one was punished for this hasty act.
The incident could be related to many others which followed: the unfortunate and unknown citizen of Duluth, for example, whoЧat the high point of that city's Welcome Average Old Abnego paradeЧwas heard to remark in good-natured amazeнment, "Why, he's just an ordinary jerk like you and me," and was immediately torn into celebratory confetti by horrified neighbors in the crowd.
Developments such as these received careful consideration from men whose power was derived from the just, if well-directed, consent of the governed.
George Abnego, these gentry concluded, represented the maturation of a great national myth which, implicit in the culture for over a century, had been brought to garish fulfillment by the mass communication and entertainment media.
This was the myth that began with the juvenile appeal to be "A Normal Red-Blooded American Boy" and ended, on the highest political levels, with a shirt-sleeved, suspendered seeker after political office boasting. "Shucks, everybody knows who I am. I'm folksЧjust plain folks."
This was the myth from which were derived such superficially disparate practices as the rite of political baby-kissing, the cult of "keeping up with the Joneses," the fopнpish, foolish, forever-changing fads which went through the population with the monotonous regularity and sweep of a windshield wiper. The myth of styles and fraнternal organizations. The myth of the "regular fellow."
There was a presidential election that year.
Since all that remained of the United States was the Middle West, the Democratic Party had disappeared. Its remnants had been absorbed by a group calling itself the Old Guard Republicans, the closest thing to an American Left. The party in powerЧthe Conservative RepublicansЧso far right as to verge upon royalism, had acquired enough pledged theocratic votes to make them smug about the election.
Desperately, the Old Guard Republicans searched for a candidate. Having regretнfully passed over the adolescent epileptic recently elected to the governorship of South Dakota in violation of the state constitutionЧand deciding against the psalm-singнing grandmother from Oklahoma who punctuated her senatorial speeches with reliнgious music upon the banjoЧthe party strategists arrived, one summer afternoon, in Fillmore, Wisconsin.
From the moment that Abnego was persuaded to accept the nomination and his last well-intentioned but flimsy objection was overcome (the fact that he was a regнistered member of the opposition party) it was obvious that the tide of battle had turned, that the fabled grass roots had caught fire.
Abnego ran for president on the slogan "Back to Normal with the Normal Man!"
By the time the Conservative Republicans met in convention assembled, the danнger of loss by landslide was already apparent. They changed their tactics, tried to meet the attack head-on and imaginatively.
They nominated a hunchback for the presidency. This man suffered from the adнditional disability of being a distinguished professor of law in a leading university; he had married with no issue and divorced with much publicity; and finally, he had once admitted to a congressional investigating committee that he had written and published surrealist poetry. Posters depicting him leering horribly, his hump twice life-size, were smeared across the country over the slogan: "An Abnormal Man for an Abnormal World!"
Despite this brilliant political stroke, the issue was never in doubt. On Election Day, the nostalgic slogan defeated its medicative adversary by three to one. Four years later, with the same opponents, it had risen to five and a half to one. And there was no organized opposition when Abnego ran for a third term...
Not that he had crushed it. There was more casual liberty of political thought alнlowed during Abnego's administrations than in many previous ones. But less politiнcal thinking and debating were done.