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

"Mrs. Dukas," she was informed, "when there is an investigation of the
deaths of two hundred million people, we have more than the right to question
anybody."
Young Ed was scared. But he felt some of the hero-impulse. Or the
desire to follow faithfully the instructions of his idol, Uncle Mitch.
"If you psych my memory, what little I know will come clearer than if I
just told it," he challenged.
This was done forthwith, out in the police car parked in the street.
When the helmet of the apparatus was removed from Eddie's head, the police had
certain comments of Mitchell Prell's to study. Possibly they could puzzle out
some of their hidden meaning. But this couldn't have satisfied them very much.
The next day the letter Prell had mentioned arrived. At least it could
be assumed that it was the one. Uncle Mitch had managed to make one step of
his purpose anyway! Under the heading of "Vital Section, Schaeffer
Laboratories," it said:
MRS. DUKAS:
Will you kindly report at your earliest convenience to the above
section. This is of greatest importance. Please bring your son.
Sincerely,
DR. M. BART
Ed was both cold with tension and hot with eagerness.
The following day he and his mother were in the battered City. Fire had
scarred it. A boiling tidal wave had washed over portions of it. But the great
building over the many subterranean levels of the Schaeffer Labs had stood
firm. Quakes had not broken it down.
An elevator took them below, to that steel and lead and
concrete-shielded place which might have resisted for a while even a noval
outburst of the sun. They were requested to lie down on something like
sensipsych couches. A voice -- maybe Dr. Bart's -- spoke to them from a
swift-gathering dream: "Think about Jack Dukas. Your husband. Your father.
Things he said. His manner of speech. His expressions, gestures, temperament,
likes and dislikes, hobbies, jokes, skills. The people that he knew. Their
faces and mannerisms. As many of them as possible will be contacted and
psyched like this, too. Think of his memories told to you. Think of everything
... everything ... everything..."
For Eileen Dukas it must have been much the same as for her son. Pearly
haze seemed to float inside Eddie's mind. Like a million bits of ancient news
clippings always in motion, his recollections of his father seemed to burst in
a thousand ever-shifting fragments within his brain. He felt an awful
compulsion to recall. It sapped his strength until all consciousness faded
away. Yet before this happened he knew that the probing would go on and on.
The next thing he knew he was sitting groggily in a pneumatic tube
train with his mother, all but exhausted, too, leaning against him. Almost as
an afterthought, their own minds and bodies had been "recorded" there at the
laboratory. They seldom exchanged questions or speculations afterward about
what had happened to them. It had been a dream. Let it be a dream.
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*CHAPTER II*
LIFE had become hard enough for Eileen Dukas and her son. While most
people treated them all right -- from some they even received exaggerated