"Arcady And Boris Strugatsky. Prisoners of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора

to correct him. Maxim doesn't understand anything. Everything's simple, but
he won't admit it. How many times have we gone through this! He takes the
most self-evident facts and turns them upside down, and it's impossible to
convince him that he's wrong. Instead, just the opposite happens: you begin
to doubt yourself. Your head starts spinning and before you know it you're
completely confused. Yet he's certainly not that stupid. He learned to speak
our language in one month and mastered reading and writing in two days. Then
read everything I own in two more days. Knows mathematics and mechanics
better than our experts. Or take, for example, his discussions with Uncle
Kaan.
"Lately, all the old man's discussions at dinner have been directed at
Maxim. And he keeps insisting to us that Maxim is the only man alive today
with such an unusual knowledge of fossil animals and such an interest in
them. He sketched some weird looking animals for Maxim, and Maxim sketched
some that were even weirder. And they argued about which was the more
ancient, which descended from which, and why. Unc even brought in scientific
books from his library, and still Maxim barely conceded a point to him. One
minute, Unc was shouting himself hoarse - the next, he was tearing the
sketches to bits and stamping on them. He called Maxim an ignoramus, a
bigger fool than Shapshu. Then he began to run his hands through the sparse
gray hair at the back of his head and mumble with a nervous smile: 'Bold,
massaraksh, bold. Young man, you certainly have an imagination!'
"He knows mathematics and mechanics; knows military chemistry very
well; and paleontology? Who in this day and age knows paleontology? Draws
like an artist, sings like a professional. And he's so generous, almost
unnaturally generous. Drove off a gang of bandits, killed most of them,
single-handed, with his bare hands. Anyone else caught in such a trap would
have taken off like a rocket. He didn't give a damn about them, yet was
upset, couldn't sleep, became annoyed when he was praised and thanked, and
even blew up once. He turned white and shouted that it was wrong to praise
someone for murder. And what a job it was to persuade him to join the
Legion! He understood everything, agreed to everything, wanted to join, but,
he said, he'd be required to shoot. At people. So I told him: not at people,
at degens, at rabble, worse than thieves. We agreed, thank God, that at the
beginning, until he got used to the idea, he would simply disarm his
opponents. Amusing, yet somehow frightening. No wonder he's always blabbing
about coming from another world. I know that world. Unc has a book about it:
The Misty Land of ZartakThe Misty Land of Zartak. It says that Zartak is
inhabited by a happy people and lies in the Alebastro Mountains. According
to the book, they're all like Maxim. But if one of them leaves the valley,
he immediately forgets where he came from and everything about his past
life. He remembers only that he came from another world. Unc says that no
such valley exists, that it's pure poppycock, that there is the Zartak
range, but the range was so thoroughly blasted by superbombs during the war
that the mountain people suffer from permanent loss of memory."

"Why so silent, Guy? Are you thinking about me?"
Guy looked away.
"Look here, Mac. I must ask you to do one thing for me. For the sake of
discipline never show that you know more than I do. Watch how the others