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

for a moment strange golden light flickered into your eyes. You went to sleep,
but you did not really go to sleep. For you became someone else. Maybe a
cartoon character in a world where everything looked different. Funny things
happened to you that frightened you at first; but then you laughed when you
found that there was no harm in them.
Or, instead of being in such a crazy fairyland, you might be a real boy
in space armor jumping across the surface of a huge chunk of rock called an
asteroid, while stars and a blazing white sun stared at you from blackness.
You were very busy helping others to roof the asteroid with crystal, and to
put air underneath, and to build houses and factories where people might live
and work. Always more and more people spreading out and out to populate the
empty worlds of space.
But you were never on that sensipsych couch for very long, or too
often. You would wake up, and there was Mom saying, "Enough, fella. A little
of that sort of thing goes a great way, even when the experiences are rugged
and educational and not just whimsical nonsense."
Ed Dukas would be angry and puzzled. For it had seemed that those
visions, going on without end, could bring joy forever.
"You'll understand sometime, Eddie," his mother would say, consoling
him. "What happens to you by sensipsych is just make-believe. What we call
recorded sensory experience. Some of it really happened to other people. Some
of it is just made up. It can teach you things. But too much is very bad. Not
so long ago folks found out."
There was something tender and hard and even scared in his mother's
words.
Ed's dad also had his comments. Dad was something called a minerals
expert.
"Come on, Eddie, let's rassle," he'd say. "Stick your chin out, boy.
Let's see how tough you can look. No, not mean-tough ... That's better. We've
got to lick the times we live in. And something in ourselves. With machines
doing so much for us, life can be soft. And sensipsych dreams are soft.
Everything in moderation. Dreams can make you feel as helpless as an oyster.
Until you despise yourself and the whole race. Yes, people found out. They
were always meant to feel strong and proud, and they must have tasks equal to
their increasing powers. Otherwise there's spiritual rot. We've got to be
ready for anything, feel our way, try to be ready to keep our balance for
whatever comes. Because life could be terrible, too, if the wonderful forces
we control got out of hand. We've got to go on progressing -- moving out to
the planets, and then maybe the stars. Got to go either ahead or backward.
Can't stand still. And it's easy to go backward nowadays. Got to fight that,
Eddie, or else there might be a kind of death."
"What is death, Dad?"
Ed's father would answer his son's serious expression with a gay grin.
"A kind of myth, now, boy. just going to sleep and never waking up. We hope
it's mostly finished, for everybody. Even the disease of old age turned out to
be something like rust gathering in a pipe. Simple. It can be fixed up. Some
people even let themselves get old. But they can be made young again. Always."
Eddie had other questions.
"You were born in the old way, Eddie," his mother said. "But so many
people are needed now to populate the solar system. So everybody can't be born