"Gordon R. Dickson - The Pritcher Mass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

The Pritcher Mass
GORDON R. DICKSON
"Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at
sunset, we were making our way through a herd of
hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen
and unsought, the phrase, 'Reverence for Life.' … Now I
had found my way to the idea in which affirmation of the
world and ethics are contained side by side; now I knew
that the ethical acceptance of the world and of life,
together with the ideals of civilization contained in this
concept, has a foundation in thought…"

Out Of My Life And Thought

by Albert Schweitzer


Chaz Sant had evoked the familiar passage from Schweitzer
out of the cluttered attic of his memory. It was to help him do
battle with the grim anger still burning inside him at having
once more failed the paranormals test for work on the Mass.
If there was anything he believed in utterly himself, it was
the cool, clean thought the old humanitarian had laid out in
that passage; but the hot flame of his own always-too-ready
fury was hard to put down. He knew as well as he knew his
own heartbeat, that he had the special ability to pass that
test. Only, it had been as if something was deliberately
tripping him as he took it …
A sudden shrieking of railcar brakes and a heavy pressure
of deceleration jerked him out of his thoughts. He lifted his
head, staring around. Everyone else in the packed city was
also staring around. But the brake shriek and the
deceleration went on, pressing all their upright bodies hard
against the straps of the commuter harnesses that protected
them.
With a rough jolt, they stopped. There was a second of
absolute silence; then the faint but distinct sounds of two
explosions from somewhere ahead of them—so faint, in fact,
that they had to come from outside the sterile seal of their
car, the middle one of a three-car Commuters Special on this
18:15 run from Chicago to the Wisconsin Dells.
Then the abnormal silence was shattered by a roar of
voices. It was a typical crowded day's-end run; and everyone
in the car's two hundred and forty harnesses seemed to be
talking at once, making guesses at what had happened. Chaz
himself was strapped in next to the long window running
along the right side of the car; but he could see nothing
unusual beyond its double thicknesses of glass. Only a
twilight, autumn-brown and weedy landscape of the unsterile
outside; a field that might once have been farmed acres was