"Raymond Z. Gallun - Dawn of the Demigods Or, People Minus X" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gallun Raymond Z)

never be back. Mitchell Prell. Even the name sounded nice.
Then slowly another question came into his mind. Where was Dad? He'd
gone out to that quartz lode and hadn't come back! Funny, thought Eddie, I
hadn't even thought about that. Well, it came from taking Dad for granted.
Someone never to worry about. Someone always around, like the hills. Eddie
clenched his fists to steady himself. No use worrying yet.
Now the torrential rains began. Steam had been boiled out of the ground
by heat. Now it was condensing. Helping, maybe, as the radio said, to wash
away the poison of the radioactive meteorites and dust that were falling to
Earth -- wreckage that hours before had been part of the Moon.
Somewhere out in the moaning storm a bell chimed out ten o'clock very
calmly. It must have been about then that what was left of Jack Dukas was
brought home in a truck. Eddie didn't see this happen. He was helping again
with the injured. And later, when Les Payten told him, Mom wouldn't let him go
into the locked room where his dad had been taken. He almost told her that he




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had a right. But he did not want to disturb her further.
Eddie was up till 4:00 a.m. By then the rescue crew had left the house
and a tentative calm had been restored in the world. The injured were in
hospitals, rigged in tents and public buildings. But there were far more dead.
Anyone caught more than a step from shelter when the catastrophe had occurred
was apt to belong to that endless list. Half a planet had been scorched by
heat and radiation.
While the guard-robots rumbled through the rain on their caterpillar
treads, Eddie simply passed out from weariness on the floor of the living
room. His mother managed to arouse him a little but not enough to send him to
bed. Rather, she folded down the twin couches from the sensipsych set. She
made her husky young son climb up onto one of them and took the other for
herself.
He slept, and his body was refreshed. And he had dreams -- not dreams
in which he was an imaginary cartoon character; nor was he toiling to make
dead asteroids habitable; nor was be enjoying an adventure on some imaginary
planet among the stars. No, for the present he had had enough of strain.
Instead he lay in grass by a little lake. The sun was bright. There were boats
with colored sails, and blue flamingos flying, and odd, elfin music. The
sensipsych was not an opiate to fill the emptiness of soft lives now. It was
rest; it was honest, relieving therapy.
Young Ed Dukas didn't see the mud-spattered truck arrive, "to be parked
some distance from the house. He did not see the figure moving in the dense
shadows. It knocked cautiously at the front door, waited for a reasonable
time, and then went around to the porch in the rear. There skillful fingers
worked carefully to release the lock. Massive luggage was lifted without sound
inside the door.
Eddie awoke with a small, hard hand shaking his shoulder. His mother
was already awake. The light was on. At first only with simple unbelief, they
beheld a slight, disheveled figure.