"Stanley G. Weinbaum - The New Adam" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

calculation. Nothing is ever quite certain, and behind every cause lies another more obscure. A housewife
puts a kettle of water on the fire to boil; it will almost certainly boil, but there is a chance, a very slight
one, that it will freeze. For even the transfer of heat is a random process, and the water may dissipate its
warmth to the fire.
Mendel packed heredity in a neat mathematical box; Freud and Jung labeled and filed environment.
Yet variations creep in. Sometimes an offspring pos-sesses qualities which neither parent could possibly
have transmitted; biologists call these beings `sports"; evolutionists speak of "mutations." These odd
individ-uals are common enough in the plant kingdom and the insect world; their discovery creates not a
ripple of scientific excitement, and day by day the curious natural experiments are born and work out
their des-tinies. Sometimes, if the variants possess inherent ad-vantages, they survive and breed true as a
new spe-cies, sometimes they breed back into the mass and are lost, and sometimes they die. A
commonplace of Nature among plants and insects; it is seldom that a scientist thinks of the phenomenon
in terms of hu-manity.

INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
DAWN ON OLYMPUS

ANNA HALL died as stolidly as she had lived, died unimaginatively in childbirth; and was perhaps
spared some maternal pangs, for her strange son lived. Nor did grim middle-aged John Hall waste his
emotional strength in either futile regrets or useless recriminations of the child. This business of living was
a stem, pitiless affair; one took what befell and did not argue. He accepted the infant, and named it after
his own father, old Edmond.
It must have been a rare accident of genes and determinants that produced Edmond HallтАФa spindly
infant, straight-legged from birth, with oddly light eyes. Yet his strangest abnormality, one that set brisk
Doctor Lindquist muttering, was his hands, his tiny slim fingers, for each of these possessed an extra joint.
He clenched his three-knuckled thumb against his four-knuckled fingers into a curious little fist, and
stared tearlessly with yellowish gray gaze.
"She would not have a hospital, Doctor Lindquist was muttering. "This is what comes of home births."
One doubted that he meant only Anna's demise; his eyes were on her son.
John Hall said nothing; there was little, indeed, that he could say. Without cavil and in grim acceptance
of little Edmond, he did what was to be done; he ar-ranged for a nurse to care for the child, and returned
somberly to his law practice. John was a good lawyer, industrious, methodical, earnest, and successful.
Certainly he missed Anna. He had liked to talk to her of an evening; not that she contributed much to
the conversation, but she was a quiet and attentive audience. The vocal formulating sometimes served to
clarify his thoughts. There was a loneliness, too, in his solitary evenings; the baby slept or lay quiet in an
upstairs room, and Magda in the kitchen made only a distant clatter. He smoked and read. For many
weeks he threaded the idealistic maze of Berkeley, and turned as counter-irritant to Hume.
After a while he took to addressing the child. It was as quiet and possibly as understanding as Anna.
Queer little brat! Tearless, almost voiceless, with eyes beginning to show peculiarly amber. It gurgled
occa-sionally; he never heard it cry. So he talked to it by evenings, sending the nurse away glad enough
for the moments of liberty. She was puzzled by the little whelp; abnormal hands, abnormal mind, she
thought; probably imbecilic. Nevertheless, she was kind enough, in a competent, professional manner.
The child began to recognize her presence; she was his refuge and source of comfort. Perhaps this thin,
dark, nervous maternal substitute influenced the infant more than he was ever to realize.
John was startled when the child's eyes began to focus. He swung his watch before it; the pale eyes
followed the movement with an intensity of gaze more kitten-like than human. A wide, unwinking stare.
Sometimes they looked straight into John's own eyes; the little being's gaze was so curiously intent that he
was a trifle startled.
Time passed quietly, uneventfully. Now little Edmond was observing his immediate world with a half