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

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 creatureтАФthe 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 ageтАФyear, month,
dayтАФwhen 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 aver-age income for that year. The very teeth in his mouth tallied in quantity and
condi-tion 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 avail-able 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 popu-lation indices, but it had resulted in an
entirely normal sample of humanityтАФun-like 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, look-ing, as many put it,
"AverageтАФaverage as hell!"
Newspapers in other states were invited to copy.
They did, slowly at first, then with an accelerating, contagious enthusiasm. In-deed, 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 pic-tures of George Abnego. "Before