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