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

Uncle Mitch's cheek was scraped. His hands were filthy. His recently
neat business suit was torn. An old jauntiness about his eyes fought with
worry, regret and wariness.
"Hello, Eileen," he said. "Hi, Nipper."
He received no answer. Somehow even Eddie felt compelled to silence. So
his uncle shifted to what was a rarity with him -- a kind of historical or
philosophical summary.
"Progress," he said with a forced laugh. "The world government
answering the threat of atomic war, years ago. Then the greatest boon of the
human race: eternal youth, and death's defeat except by violence, producing
the problem of overpopulation, to be relieved by the colonization of the solar
system. Then peace and boredom and the sensipsych dreams leading to decadence,
loss of pride in self and even rebellious violence; then the solution of
vigorous, realistic action, more and more people to enjoy life, more and more
colonies. Then, as we reach out for the stars, this. Life. The great adventure
that can't be stopped. The rise from barbarism. Is it even well begun?"
His words, half appropriate and half in supremely bad taste now, as
Mitchell Prell well knew -- though he had to say them because of the need to
say something -- still fell into a void of silence and echoed through the
house like a cheap speech.
Sighing raggedly, he tried again: "Yes, I'm alive, Eileen. The ship
from the Moon was in space before the blowup happened. We rode ahead of the
main shock wave at high speed. So we won through. From the final warning
message from the Moon, I gather that trouble started in the warp chambers. The
heat and pressure were restrained by the tight space warp for awhile until
inter-dimensional barriers ripped wide open. The whole mass of the Moon was in
the way. By old standards it couldn't happen; but a lot of lunar-atoms went
all to pieces in a flare of high energy. The tough part is that we achieved a
workable motor principle for stellar ships weeks ago. The blowup came from
side line testing."




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 Once more no words answered Mitchell Prell when he stopped talking. He
waited, but his sister's eyes remained cold.
"All right, Eileen," he went on at last. "You're thinking that I am one
of the specialists who is responsible for this. Surely I'm the only survivor
among those research men who were on the Moon. But remember this: we weren't
working on our own. We were hired, under a democratic system, and told what to
hunt for. It was the best that could be done, except that the lab should have
been put farther away, on some lonely asteroid. Logically, then, we are not
solely to blame for what has happened. But it doesn't work that way, Eileen.
Under grief and hysteria logic still collapses, even in our time. In a real
crisis there continue to be many people who need scapegoats. A collective
mishap, the result of a mass desire for more knowledge, then becomes a
personal guilt. So I'm a fugitive, Eileen."
It was a strange, bitter thing for Eddie Dukas to watch his mother and
uncle facing each other, not friends, his mother's face a hard mask of