"Arcady And Boris Strugatsky. Prisoners of Power" - читать интересную книгу автораShould such people not know?"
"Maybe it's precisely this kind that shouldn't," replied Vepr in the same quiet voice. Puzzled, Maxim kept shifting his glance from one to the other. Suddenly both men seemed to wilt as the same expression appeared on their faces. No longer did Maxim see the steely Vepr, the Vepr who had defied the prosecutor and the drumhead court. And Zefs reckless vulgarity had vanished. Something else had broken through: a sadness, a hidden despair, a sense of deep hurt, a submissiveness. It was as if they had suddenly remembered something, something that should have been forgotten, that they had tried hard to forget. "I'm going to tell him," declared Zef, without asking for permission or consulting Vepr. Vepr remained silent and Zef began his story. What he described was incredible. Incredible in itself, incredible because it left no room for doubt. While Zef spoke, softly, calmly, in impeccably precise language, pausing politely when Vepr interjected brief remarks, Maxim strained hard to find a loophole in this new image of their world. But in vain. The emerging picture was coherent, primitive, and hopelessly logical: it covered all the facts known to Maxim, leaving nothing unexplained. It was the most frightening discovery Maxim had made on his inhabited island. It was not for the degens that the towers had been designed. The radiation strikes affected the nervous system of every human being on the planet. The physiological mechanism was unknown, but, in essence, the brain of an individual exposed to radiation lost its capacity to analyze reality believed rabidly, fanatically, despite the evidence of his own eyes. The most elementary propaganda techniques could convince anyone inside the radiation field of anything: he would lovingly accept whatever was presented as the shining truth, the only truth, a truth for which he would gladly live, suffer, and die. The field was everywhere. Invisible, omnipresent, all-pervasive. A gigantic network of towers enmeshing the entire country emitted radiation around the clock. It purged tens of millions of souls of any doubts they might have about the All-Powerful Creators' words and deeds. The Creators controlled the minds and energy of millions. They inculcated in people an acceptance of the repugnant ideas of violence and aggression; they could drive millions against cannons and machine guns; they could compel these millions to kill one another in the name of anything they pleased; they could, should the whim strike them, stir up a mass epidemic of suicides. Nothing was beyond their control. Twice daily, at ten in the morning and at ten in the evening, the network was turned on full blast; and for thirty minutes people lost all their humanity. All the hidden tensions which had accumulated in their subconscious as a result of the gap between what they had been led to believe and reality were liberated in a paroxysm of delirious enthusiasm, in an impassioned, servile ecstasy. The radiation strikes suppressed natural reflexes and instincts completely and replaced them with a fantastic complex of behavior patterns. These patterns involved the worship of the Creators. The radiated individual lost his capacity to reason; he behaved like a |
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