"Gordon R. Dickson - The Human Edge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

"Eldridge Parker—Eldridge Timothy Parker—"
What are you?
"I'm Eldridge Parker—"
Tell about yourself.
"Tell what? What?"
Tell about yourself.
"What? What do you want to know? What—"
Tell about. . . .
"But I—"
Tell. . . .
***
. . . well, i suppose i was pretty much like any of the kids around our town . . . i was a pretty good
shot and i won the fifth grade seventy-five yard dash . . . i played hockey, too . . . pretty cold weather
up around our parts, you know, the air used to smell strange it was so cold winter mornings in January
when you first stepped out of doors . . . it is good, open country, new england, and there were lots of
smells . . . there were pine smells and grass smells and i remember especially the kitchen smells . . . and
then, too, there was the way the oak benches in church used to smell on Sunday when you knelt with
your nose right next to the back of the pew ahead. . . .
. . . the fishing up our parts is good too . . . i liked to fish but i never wasted time on
weekdays . . . we were presbyterians, you know, and my father had the farm, but he also had money
invested in land around the country . . . we have never been badly off but i would have liked a
motor-scooter. . . .
. . . no i did not never hate the germans, at least i did not think i ever did, of course though i was
over in europe i never really had it bad, combat, i mean . . . i was in a motor pool with the raw smell of
gasoline, i like to work with my hands, and it was not like being in the infantry. . . .
. . . i have as good right to speak up to the town council as any man . . . i do not believe in pushing
but if they push me i am going to push right back . . . nor it isn't any man's business what i voted last
election no more than my bank balance . . . but i have got as good as right to a say in town doings as if i
was the biggest landholder among them. . . .
. . . i did not go to college because it was not necessary . . . too much education can make a fool of
any man, i told my father, and i know when i have had enough . . . i am a farmer and will always be a
farmer and i will do my own studying as things come up without taking out a pure waste of four years to
hang a piece of paper on the wall. . . .
. . . of course i know about the atom bomb, but i am no scientist and no need to be one, no more
than i need to be a veterinarian . . . i elect the men that hire the men that need to know those things and
the men that i elect will hear from me johnny-quick if things do not go to my liking. . . .
. . . as to why i never married, that is none of your business . . . as it happens, i was never at ease
with women much, though there were a couple of times, and i still may if jeanie lind. . . .
. . . i believe in god and the united states of america. . . .
***
 He woke up gradually. He was in a room that might have been any office, except the furniture was
different. That is, there was a box with doors on it that might have been a filing cabinet and a table that
looked like a desk in spite of the single thin rod underneath the center that supported it. However, there
were no chairs—only small, flat cushions, on which three large woolly, bearlike creatures were sitting
and watching him in silence.
He himself, he found, was in a chair, though.
As soon as they saw his eyes were open, they turned away from him and began to talk among
themselves. Eldridge Parker shook his head and blinked his eyes, and would have blinked his ears if that
had been possible. For the sounds the creatures were making were like nothing he had ever heard
before; and yet he understood everything they were saying. It was an odd sensation, like a double-image