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

coldness.
Then, all at once, her icy poise crumbled. "Jack isn't alive any more,"
she said. "My husband. That's the fact that I know best. You with your glib
talk, my brother, are one person directly in the chain of events that caused
Jack's death. I don't accuse you, Mitch. I just say that I can't look on you
now with any pleasure. That's all."
Then, sitting there on the sensipsych couch, she began to cry. It was
painful for Eddie to watch. He had never seen her do that before.
But Mitchell Prell chuckled. He sat beside his sister and put his arm
around her. "Are things so bad?" he chided. "Look, Eileen. People used to
consider biological life the deepest secret of nature. Because he was at the
top of his local life scale, man would not have been flattered to know that
the vital force in him wasn't the greatest, the most indecipherable of
enigmas. But it's true, Eileen. Year after year we've learned more about cell
function, genes, chromosomes, the natural molding of living things, and the
final process in protoplasm, which is the spark itself. Men like Schaeffer
have been making simple life for years, while they traced out more complex
riddles. For a long time they've been replacing diseased or damaged organs
from scattered cells drawn from the bodies of many donors. Now they've gone
further and have grown such organs in a culture fluid, from a microscopic bit
of tissue. It is already theoretically possible to re-create an entire man,
provided there is a pattern. It was for repair purposes, after possible
accidents, that everyone was urged to have his body structure recorded --
especially that of his brain. All you have to do, Eileen, is have Jack's
record turned over to the same laboratories that do rejuvenation. In two or
three years he'll come back to you just as he was. Soon there might even be a
simpler, better way."
Eileen Dukas's laugh was brittle and bitter. "A roll of fine,
sensitized wire," she said. "Kept in a box no bigger than the first joint of a
finger. Supposed to be safe in a vault. The pattern of a human being. Well,
Mitch, there just isn't any such box for Jack. Or for Eddie or me either, for
that matter. We just didn't get around to it. Jack was somehow half against
it."
Again there was a silence. For Eddie it seemed to have the quiet of
forever in it. No whistling of Dad's tunes. No sly winks, or play at being
tough, just memory.
"All bodies that are being picked up are being sent through the
recorder," Uncle Mitch offered at last. "Refined radar does the trick. The
finest variations of even brain structure -- the mold of mind, personality,
and memory -- are found and recorded. Wasn't that done for Jack?"
Eddie's mother nodded. "Only," she stammered, "the whole top of his
head was charred. There wasn't enough of him left. Oh, you and your damned
science, Mitch."
She was weeping again. Mitchell Prell became either cruel or perhaps he
spoke in self-defense.




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