"Bernard Wolfe - Limbo '90" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Bernard)

and draw birds and trees. I want to sleep all the time.'

'You are much improved, Notoa. I noticed just now that when you said "Peace" it was not just a thing to
say, you meant it. The reports I hear from Dr Martine are very good.'

'People say I used to fight,' Notoa said, looking down at the floor. 'When I hear about it I feel ashamed. I
do not know what used to make me hit my relatives.'

'You were troubled.'

Notoa regarded his hands with wonder. 'It is very hard now even to make a fist, when I try it is a great
effort and it does not feel right. Dr Martine says the electric charge in my tensor muscles is down many
points, he showed me on the measuring machine. Most of the time I am very sleepy.'

'Only the troubled are afraid of sleep.' Ubu, patted the youngster again. 'Speaking of Dr Martine, where
is he?'

Notoa yawned again. 'In surgery. Moaga was brought this afternoon.'

'Yes, I forgot.' Ubu nodded and started down the corridor. Notoa swung the slab of rock to, and
abruptly the rustling, crackling, croaking, twittering, twanging, twitching, ranting, jeering sounds of the
jungle were cut off. In the sudden hush Ubu became aware of the throttled hum from the fans Dr Martine
had installed in camouflaged shafts overhead to pump a steady flow of fresh, filtered, dehumidified, and
aseptic air into the great underground hollow. The doctor liked to put his motors everywhere: on fishing
boats, on the chisels and adzes used in hollowing out logs to make canoes, on stones for grinding maize,
even on the saws for cutting skulls off. Such machines were not necessary, of course, they only took a
man away from his natural work and made his mind and hands idle. One thing only was bad about this
mechanization, it upset the routine. Because there were so many machines to do the work the young men
now had much time to talk and study with the doctor and the old habits of work began to slip. The old
habits made for a great steadiness, a looking in one fixed direction along a straight line...

As he passed the row of cubicles, Ubu peered through the one-way glass on each door at the patient
inside. Most of these Mandungabas were recent operatees, with tentlike bandages still on their heads, but
some of them had had their dressings removed and were beginning to sprout new crops of hair over their
scars. Ubu studied their faces as he went along, looking for signs of the tautness which had been a
chronic torment for all of them before Mandunga. He knew what to watch for: narrowed eyes, tight rigid
lips, corrugated foreheads, a hunched stiffness in the shoulder muscles - flexings of those who live in a
world of perpetual feints and pounces.

No, there was no tell-tale strain in these once troubled people. If anything, their features and bodies
seemed to have relaxed to the point of falling apart: heads lolling, mouths loose and hanging open, arms
and legs flung like sacks of maize on the pallets. Well, a sleepy man does not break his uncle's nose.

Beyond the cubicles was the large animal-experimentation chamber in which the tarsiers, marmosets,
pottos, lemurs, and chimpanzees huddled listlessly in their cages, most of them also wearing head
bandages; beyond that, the laboratory in 19 which most of the doctor's encephalographs and other
power-driven apparatus were kept; and finally, in the farthest corner of the hollow, the operating room.
The window in this door was of ordinary two-way glass, Ubu could see that Dr Martine was just slicing
through the last portion of Moaga's cranium with his automatic rotary saw.