"Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld SS - Tales of Riverworld" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

States. There he had lectured on and practiced his new art of healing and
sometimes established colleges of osteopathy. Denver, Colorado; Quincy,
Missouri; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Cincinnati, Ohio; LaFayette and
Indianapolis, Indiana; Dallas and Corsicana, Texas; Baker, City, Oregon; Los
Angeles, California, and many other places.
Then he had originated Neuropathy, an eclectic discipline of healing. It
combined all the best features of osteopathy, chiropracty, magnetism,
homeopathy, and other systems of drugless medicine. He had preached that God-
inspired gospel throughout the country. And he had written four thick books
that were used by osteopaths and ophthalmologists and read by many laymen
throughout the United States.
"From going to and fro in the earth and from walking up and down in it."
That was Satan's answer to God when He said, "Whence comest thou?" That could
be said also of Andrew P. Davis. But Davis loathed Satan, and his model was
Job, who "was perfect and upright and one that feared God and eschewed evil."
Since Davis had awakened on the Riverworld, he had suffered the torments of
Job. Yet he had not faltered in his faith any more than had Job. God must have
made this world, but the Great Tempter was here too. To realize that, you just
had to look around at the inhabitants.
Riverworlders dreamed most often about lost Earth. The one exception to this
was the nightmare about their mass resurrection, the Day of the Great Shout
when all
CROSSING THE DARK RIVER 3
the dead had screamed at one time. What a cry that must have been!
Doctor Andrew Paxton Davis had often awakened moaning, sometimes screaming,
from that nightmare. But he had another dream that distressed him even more.
For instance, on this early and still-dark morning of the fifth anniversary of
The Day, he had painfully oozed into wakefulness from a Riverworld-inspired
nightmare. Not terror but shame and humiliation had written the script for
that sleep-drama.
He had gotten his M.D. from Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1867. But,
after many years as a physician in the rural areas of Illinois and Indiana, he
had become unhappy with the practice. Always a seeker after truth, he had
become convinced that the new science and art of healing devised by Dr. Andrew
Taylor Still was a breakthrough. Davis had been in the first class (1893) to
complete the courses of the newly established American School of Osteopathy in
Kirksville, Missouri.
But, ever questioning, ever seeking, he had decided that osteopathy alone was
not enough. Hence, his own discipline and his founding of the College of
Neuropathy in Los Angeles. When he died at the age of eighty-four of stomach
cancer—he also had nightmares about that long agony—he was still the head of a
flourishing practice. However, medical science had improved considerably from
his birth in 1835 to his death in 1919. And, from then on, it had accelerated
at an incredible velocity. His late-twentieth-century informants made it sound
like one of those scientific romances by H.G. Wells.
In the first two years on the Riverworld, he had proudly, at first, anyway,
told the doctors he met of his knowledge and accomplishments. He had also
confided
4 Philip Jos€ Farmer
his belief that the Savior had been born again. So many had laughed at him