"Michael Kandel - Strange Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kandel Michael)

alarming hallucinations regularly, yet who
notwithstanding this affliction remains on
a tolerant, even friendly footing with his
mind—we feel that such a person is
eminently suited to fill the difficult position
of guardian against the Öht.

"The Öht?" I asked.
The phone rang.
"They are, you might say, tourists," a voice began conversationally when I picked up the receiver.
"'Tourist' may not sound threatening, but consider what tourists are and what they do. The quick ruin they
work on an indigenous population."
"Who is this?"
"Tourists," the voice went on, "show no respect. They'll track mud in a museum, eat potato chips in
a temple. With their chewing gum and transistor radios they demoralize the natives."
I hung up. No run-of-the-mill attack, this. I called Lucille again. She asked if I was keeping up the
medication.
I was.
"Tell me how you feel, Wally. Are you upset?"
Not too. A little fluttery in the stomach. I didn't know where all this was leading.
She thought a moment. "See it through. It may lead to an insight. But no screaming."
It took a lot, these days, to make me scream. And yet there was a time I screamed so much that
screaming was like breathing. But the body still had its reflexes; it could knot up, panic, the panic feeding
on itself, the pulse going out of control. That was why I needed the pills.

One must confront—continued the letter in my
hand—not only radically different biological
forms (and those in an incredible variety), but
radically different cultures, concepts, value
systems, weltanschauungs.

I looked up "Weltanschauung" in my Webster's. The entry read, immediately after the definition, in
tiny letters that flashed:

It is the sequence of conceptual-moral
differences, rather than the biological,
that tends to erode one's grip on reality.

"I suppose," I muttered, "that if I turn on the television, it will deliver the next sentence."
The television, as if to oblige, flicked on, though I was on the other side of the room and owned no
remote control. The show was Sesame Street. Ernie tilted his head and said, in Ernie's reasonable way:
"We're doing our best to communicate, Mr. Griffith."
"Communicate," I said, pulling up a chair. So far nothing was leaping out at me with fangs bared.
Ernie turned into a businesslike Dan Rather, who said: "Most individuals are unable to serve as a
buffer between their species and the Öht for any practical length of time. Their personalities dissolve."
"Where do these Öht come from?" I asked.
The famous anchorman gave one of his charming-wise smiles. "From an unimaginably great number
of unimaginably distant places. They are identified not by origin, and not in any political-territorial sense,
but solely by what you might call their religion or sport—because their visiting of other seats of civilization
has the elements both of a religion and a sport."