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

silvery ring of lunar wreckage brightened in the sky.
"The old kind, Eddie," he answered.
"I'm glad," Ed said, feeling greatly relieved, a reaction which he knew
was odd for one who loved the thought of coming miracles.
Jack Dukas sighed as if he had escaped a terrible fate. "So am I glad,
pal," he said. "I guess I was favored by family connections." Here he paused,
but his wink meant Uncle Mitch. "However," he continued, "the old flesh takes
so much longer. That's why in many cases it won't be used. There must be
thousands of androids already among us, living like everybody else. Since
personal concerns are involved, statistics are kept rather confidential. These
synthetic people have organs the same as we have. And you can't recognize them
just by looking, only they're thirty per cent heavier, stronger, and they
don't tire. There was a thought, once, that robots would make human beings
obsolete and replace them. Sorry, Eddie. Why be gruesome at a time like this?
Let's patch you up and then find your mother."
****
Young Ed Dukas was happier than he had ever been before. For quite a
while he found peace. Maybe that was true of most of humanity now -- for the
past three or four years at least. There was no sharp delineation of an
interval before the smokes of doubt began to come back.
Les Payten was still around. And Barbara Day continued to live at the
Youth Center on the hill. Often the three would meet. Their childhood was
behind them, Barbara Day's freckles had faded. Her dark hair had a coppery
glint. A promise of beauty had begun to blossom. And her talk expressed many
whimsical thoughts.
"We all know each other, Eddie," she once said. "So don't be offended.
I sometimes think that you wonder whether your father is really the same
person that he was -- whether he ever could be more than a careful duplicate."
Les Payten frowned. "You're speaking to me, too, Babs," he pointed out.
"I also have a 'memory father.' He's good to me, and mostly I like him. But
sometimes I get scared, though I don't always know why."
Ed's skin tingled. "Could I be myself now and still be myself in
another body, years later? Could there ever be two of me -- truly-constructed
exactly the same? I don't deny such a thing. I simply don't know."
But Ed Dukas continued to wonder about his father. There were several
occasions when his dad was supposed to recognize certain people, casually
encountered in the street. For they knew him.
Ed was present on one of these occasions. "Sorry, friend," Jack Dukas
apologized to a burly, jovial man. "I guess they forgot to put a picture of
you inside my head."
Les Payten's father was also subtly different from his original --
though in a somewhat different way. The change was even very dimly apparent in
his face. He had once been a big, easy-going, timid soul, nagged by his wife.
Now his features bore a hint of brutality. He walked with a slight swagger. He
did not roar, but the aura of power was there.
Ed's mother explained the change to his father: "Memory seems not
always to match facts, Jack. Mrs. Payten fooled herself into believing that
Ronald Payten used to be a bully. So she even fooled Schaeffer's
mind-machines. And lo! Ronald Payten is a bully now, as far as she is
concerned. No, don't worry about her too much, Jack. She may even like being