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

But no answer came, and his wondering gaze found nothing unusual in the
room around him. He froze. "Nipper." It could be part of a message, an honest
attempt to convey vitally important information. Or it could be the forerunner
of violence aimed in his direction. Through no fault of his own, he had had
enemies for ten years. Tonight they might really act. To die was still
possible. In spite of vitaplasm. Or the more tedious method that employed
natural flesh. Or the tiny cylinders hidden away in vaults. Lives were now in
danger again. Human, and almost human...
For a moment Ed wanted to give a warning and to call others into
consultation. He wanted to shout, "Dad! Mom! Come here!"
He didn't do so. Between himself and the precise, benign personality
that he called Dad there was a gradually growing barrier. And for his mother,
beautiful and young by art and science, he had that feeling of male
protectiveness that takes the form of keeping possible dangers hidden.
Ed decided to work on his own. Being essentially careful and slow
moving when it came to delicate processes, he had not touched that creeping
droplet of ink. Its secret might thus be destroyed. No, he'd never do a thing
so foolish.
Swiftly he folded the paper and fastened the writing under his
microscope. The ink speck was almost dry now, and nothing was hidden in it.
The line of the writing itself was odd under magnification. Here and there it
showed tiny, irregular dots at spaced intervals, connected by fine, dragging
marks. That was all.
Of course he realized that Nipper might be only the first cryptic word
of a message and that he had only to wait and see what would follow.




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 Until he began to wait, however, the significance of the word itself
eluded him. A child's nickname was all that it suggested.
But now his mind bore down on it. And he had the answer almost at once.
A small boy climbing the wall of a pretty garden. And his casual christening
by a pleasant stranger who met him thus for the first time. Among more vivid
and significant details, the memory of the name itself had been mislaid. But
Ed Dukas knew that in his boyhood one person had always called him Nipper:
Uncle Mitch Prell, and nobody else. Now it seemed like a secret sign.
Ed gulped, his reaction suspended somewhere between shocked pleasure
and a frosty sense of eeriness. To have a friend, whom he had loved as a
child, vanish into space and into apparent nonexistence after becoming a
fugitive, and then to have what seemed to be this friend try to communicate
again after ten years, and in this weird manner -- well how would you say it?
Ghosts, of course, were pure superstition. But in this age one could still
react as if to the supernatural with tingling hide and quickened heartbeats.
In fact, with the vast growth of technology, more than ever was such a feeling
possible.
"Uncle Mitch!" Ed Dukas called quietly.
Again there was no reply. The name on the paper still could be somebody
else's trick. Granger's, maybe. There were ways for him to have learned a