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

locked his room before. The girl must have thought he wanted privacy.
Maybe he had.
Aunt Maggie's ties glittered obscenely at the foot of the bed. He chucked them into the closet as he
removed his hat and coat. Then he went over to the washstand and washed his hands, slowly. He turned
around.
This was it. At last the great cubical bulk that had been lurking quietly in the cor-ner of his vision was
squarely before him. It was there and it undoubtedly contained all the outlandish collection he
remembered.
"Open," he said, and the box opened.
The book, still open to the metallic table of contents, was lying at the bottom of the box. Part of it
had slipped into the chamber of a strange piece of apparatus. Sam picked both out gingerly.
He slipped the book out and noticed the apparatus consisted mostly of some sort of binoculars,
supported by a coil and tube arrangement and bearing on a flat green plate. He turned it over. The
underside was lettered in the same streaky way as the book. Combination Electron Microscope and
Workbench.
Very carefully he placed it on the floor. One by one, he removed the other items, from the Junior
Biocalibrator to the Jiffy Vitalizer. Very respectfully he ranged against the box in five multi-colored
rows the phials of lymph and the jars of basic cartilage. The walls of the chest were lined with
indescribably thin and wrinkled sheets; a slight pressure along their edges expanded them into
three-dimensional outlines of hu-man organs whose shape and size could be varied with pinching any part
of their surfaceтАФmost indubitably molds.
Quite an assortment. If there was anything solidly scientific to it, that box might mean unimaginable
wealth. Or some very useful publicity. OrтАФwell, it should mean something!
If there was anything solidly scientific to it.
Sam flopped down on the bed and opened to A Child's Garden of Biochemistry.


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 We-ber 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, coun-selor, 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 constructтАФwith improvements!тАФunicellular 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.