"Harlan Ellison - Paingod & Other Delusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

best.
And then, finally: I must know. I must know!
...while he spun a fiber of melancholy down to a double-thoraxed insect-creature on Io, speared with dread a
blob of barely sentient mud on Acaras III, pain-goaded into suicide an electrical wave-being capable of producing
exquisite fifteen-toned harmonics on Syndon Beta V, reduced by half the pleasures of a pitiable slug thing in the
methane caves of Kkklll IV, enshrouded in bitterness and misery a man named Colin Marshack on an insignificant
planet called Sol III, Earth, Terra, the world...
And then, finally: I will know. I will know!
Trente removed the scale model of Earth from the display crate, and stared at it. Such a tiny thing, such a
helpless thing, to support the nightwalk of a Paingod.
He selected the most recent recipient of his attentions, through no more involved method than that, and used
the means of travel his race had long since perfected to leave his encased cubicle hanging translucent against the
stars. Trente, Paingod of the universes, for the first time in all the centuries he had lived that life of giving, never
receiving, left his place, and left his Now, and went to find out. To find out...what? He had no way of knowing.
For the Paingod, it was the first nightwalk.

Pieter Koslek had been born in a dwarf province of a minuscule Central European country long since
swallowed up by a tiny power now a member of the Common Market. He had left Europe early in the 1920s, had
shipped aboard a freighter to Bolivia and, after working his way as common deckhand and laborer through half a dozen
banana republics, had been washed up on an inland shore of the United States in 1934. He had promptly gone to earth,
gone to seed, and gone to fat. A short stint in a CCC camp, a shorter stint as a bouncer in a Kansas City speak, a term
in the Illinois State Workhouse, a long run on the Pontiac assembly line making an obscure part for an obscure
segment of a B-17’s innards, a brief fling as owner of a raspberry farm, and an extended period as a skid
row-frequenting wino summed up his life. Now, as now would be reckoned by any sane man’s ephemeris, Pieter
Koslek was a wetbrain-an alcoholic so sunk in the fumes and vapors of his own liquor need that he was barely
recognizable as a human being. Lying soddenly, but quietly, in an alley two blocks up from the Greyhound bus station
in downtown Los Angeles, Pieter Koslek, age fifty-nine, weight 210, hair filth gray, eyes red and moist and closed,
unceremoniously died. That simply, that unconcernedly, that uneventfully for all the young-old men in overlong GI
surplus overcoats who passed by that alley mouth unseeing, uncaring-Pieter Koslek died. His brain gave out, his
lungs ceased to bellow, his heart refused to pump, his blood slid to a halt in his veins, and breath no longer passed his
lips. He died. End of story, beginning of story. As he lay there, half-propped against the brick wall with its shredded
reminder of a lightweight boxing match between two stumblebums long since passed into obscurity and the files of
Ring Magazine, a thin tepid vapor of pale green came to the useless body of Pieter Koslek; touched it; felt of it;
entered it; Trente was on the planet Earth, Sol III.
If it had been possible to mount an epitaph on bronze for the wetbrain, there on the wall of the alley perhaps,
the most fitting would have been: HERE LAY PIETER KOSLEK. NOTHING IN HIS LIFE BECAME HIM SO MUCH AS
THE LEAVING OF IT.

The thick-bodied orator on the empty packing crate had gathered a sizable crowd. His license was encased in
plastic, and it had been pinned to a broom handle sharpened and driven into the ground. An American flag hung
limply from a pole on the other side of the makeshift podium. The flag had only forty-eight stars; it had been
purchased long before Hawaii or Alaska had joined the union, but new flags cost money, and
“Scum! Like sewer water poured into your bloodstream! Look at them, do they look like you, do they smell
like you-those smells, those, those stinks that walk like men! That’s what they are, stinks with voting privileges, all of
them, the niggers, the kike-jews who own the land and the apartments you live in, what they think they’re big deals!
The spicks, the Puerto Rican filth that takes over your streets and rapes your women and puts its lousy hands on your
white young daughters, that scum...”
Colin Marshack stood in the crowd, staring up at the thick-bodied orator, his shaking hands thrust deep into
his sport jacket pockets, his head throbbing, the unlit cigarette hanging unnoticed from his lips. Every word.
“...Commies in public office, is what we have got to be content with. Nigger lovers and pawns of the kike