"Brian Herbert - The Race for God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

undoubtedly brimming with electronic gizmos. You can bet undercover agents are crawling all over this place."
McMurtrey shifted on his feet. He appeared uncomfortable at the reporter's candor.
In the background, Orbust saw an almost uniform fleet of spaceships, described in recent news accounts. They extended
into the distance in a most unusual straight line, with some perched precariously on frameworks over building tops or stradd
streets, as if the whole bunch had been set down indiscriminately from above. They were fat ships of nearly the same size
shape, like big ripe pomegranates with nubby points on top. Some were bright and shiny red, others glistened varying shade
yellow and orange, and others were white. There appeared to have been some consideration for the town beneath the ship
wherever a building top, fence, or other structure lay beneath, the underside of the craft had been custom-fitted with a shin
metal landing platform that straddled the structure without touching it, so that the weight of the ship actually rested on the
ground.
"For those who tuned in late," the reporter said, "tell everyone again where you're going with these ships. I'm still having
hard time believing this."
"We're going to see God!" McMurtrey responded ebulliently.
The reporter faced the camera, and it zoomed in for a close-up of her face. "There you have it, Inner Planet citizens," sh
said. "Shortly after Mr. McMurtrey's historical announcement of God's location, a fleet of ships appeared in his town from
nowhere, apparently ready to go. Who will fly them? The Grand Exalted Rooster does not know. Only God, it seems, has t
information. No explanation has been tendered as to how the ships got here, but the fact remains that they are here. I have
touched their outsides, and they are not apparitions. Something very unusual is occurring here on the Wessornian coast."
Orbust focused on the nearest ship visible, a white craft behind the reporter, and as the picture changed he held the imag
the ship in his mind. It looked familiar, inexplicably so, and he felt particularly drawn to it. Despite its apparent similarity to
other ships, there remained something materially different about this one, something intriguing and magnetic.
He had to touch it.
Within an hour, Orbust was on his way to St. Charles Beach by airbus, having exchanged his wife's stash of household m
for a note.



Two
The concept of my memory machine "Mnemo" came to me in a dream that provided a complete vision of the device, its na
and its operation. For a Iong while before, I had postulated a collective genetic memory in mankind, going back to antiquity—
that fired electrochemical impulses along imprinted brain routes, causing people to war repeatedly in the same tragic ways.
theory explained deja-vu and the instantaneous love or hatred people felt for one another, for old emotions never died. I longe
prove that each human life created an overlay of events in the collective brain, a track over old tracks, and that with each new
tracking old incidents slipped further into an individual's subconscious. Ancient events were just beneath the surface, and I ne
to find them. The miracle of my dream revealed how! A subject connected to my mnemonic machine could carry us back in h
memory to the earliest twitchings of all life. Inevitably that had to lead to the Creator Himself, if He existed, and to the singula
explosion whence the universe began. —Notes of Professor Nathan Pelter, League Penitentiary System Archives
 A short distance inland from St. Charles Beach, a shiny-black truck-trailer with no chrome or markings slithered along th
winding road to Santa Quininas Federal Penitentiary. It was shortly past sunrise, and the rig's tinted windows reflected the
first rays of sun. The rig came to a stop outside the main gate, hissed its brakes. A guard in magenta and brown armor step
from his booth and waved a transmitter baton at the heavy iron alloy gate. The gate swung open toward the interior of the
compound, and the truck went through.
Harley Gutan parked the Dispatch Unit in the same spot as always, by the heavy alloy door that led to Death Row.
Wondering how many prisoners would be dispatched this time, he activated the electronic clip pad on the seat by him and n
twenty-nine names.
He felt cold pain in an airspace where a severed little finger once had been, before a childhood tricycling accident. Some
he moved the missing finger as if it were in an unseen dimension, even touched it with his other hand and felt it. Now he tu
the affected hand between his flank and the seat cushion, to keep the finger warm.
Why did it get so cold?
In the Inner Planet League, prison authorities no longer executed people with gas, electricity, hanging, lethal injections or