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

expected.
He had still been plodding through his ABC's when Guy had persisted in
asking him where he came from. It was useless to show him drawings: Guy
would accept them with a strange smile on his face and continue to repeat
the same question: "Where are you from?" Irritated, Maxim finally pointed to
the ceiling with his pencil and said: "From the sky." To Maxim's surprise,
Guy thought this a completely natural explanation and began to rattle off
words that Maxim at first assumed were the names of planets in their solar
system. But Guy opened a map, and Maxim saw that they were not the names of
planets but of antipodal countries. Maxim shrugged his shoulders, used up
his entire stock of negative expressions, and began to study the map. The
conversation had ended there for the time being.
One evening, several days later, Maxim and Rada had been watching
television. A very strange program was being shown that resembled a movie
without beginning or end. It had no plot, just an endless stream of actors,
rather weird individuals who, from the point of view of any humanoid,
behaved rather savagely. Rada watched with interest, shrieked, grabbed
Maxim's sleeve, and twice burst into tears. Maxim became bored quickly and
was about to doze off to some gloomy music when, suddenly, something
familiar flashed across the screen. He rubbed his eyes. There, on the
screen, was Pandora. A morose takhorg was dragging itself through the
jungle, crushing trees. Suddenly Peter appeared with a decoy in his arms.
Very engrossed and serious, he backed away, tripped on a snag, and flew
backward into a swamp. Maxim was startled to recognize his own mentogram.
Then came another, and still another, without narration, and with the
identical musical background.
And Pandora disappeared, yielding the screen to an emaciated blind man
who crawled along a ceiling covered by a dusty spider web. "What's that?"
asked Maxim, pointing to the screen.
"A TV program," snapped Rada. "It's interesting. Watch it."
It made no sense to him. It suddenly occurred to him that these might
be the mentograms of other visitors from outer space. But he quickly
rejected this thought: the worlds portrayed on television were too terrible,
too monotonous: stuffy little rooms; endless corridors cluttered with
furniture that suddenly sprouted gigantic thorns; spiral staircases winding
into the impenetrable gloom of narrow stairwells; basements, with barred
windows, jammed with crawling bodies, and immobile faces locked in pain
peering through the bars. These images were closer to a grotesque delirium
than to real worlds. In comparison, Maxim's mentograms sparkled with
realism.
Similar programs were repeated almost daily and were called Magic
JourneyMagic Journey. But Maxim could never understand their point. In reply
to his questions, Guy and Rada merely shrugged their shoulders in
bewilderment. "It's a TV program. That's the way it's done to make it
interesting. It's a magic journey. A fairy tale. Watch it! Sometimes it's
funny, sometimes it's frightening." Maxim began to doubt very seriously that
the purpose of Professor Hippo's research was to facilitate communication
between his planet and visitors from outer space.
About ten days later this intuitive conclusion was confirmed
indirectly. Guy had passed the entrance exams for the Independent Study