"C M Kornbluth - The Marching Morons Collection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

After administration of the anesthetic, the dentist resorted to his drill. By freakish mischance, a short
circuit in his machine delivered 220 volts of 60-cycle current into the patient. (In a damage suit instituted
by Mrs. Barlow against the dentist, the University and the makers of the drill, a jury found for the
defendants.) Mr. Barlow never got up from the dentist's chair and was assumed to have died of
poisoning, electrocution or both.

Morticians preparing him for embalming discovered, however, that their subject was-though certainly not
living-just as certainly not dead. The University was notified and a series of exhaustive tests was begun,
including attempts to duplicate the trance state on volunteers. After a bad run of seven cases which ended
fatally, the attempts were abandoned.

Honest John was long an exhibit at the University museum and livened many a football game as mascot
of the University's Blue Crushers. The bounds of taste were overstepped, however, when a pledge to
Sigma Delta Chi was ordered in '03 to "kidnap" Honest John from his loosely guarded glass museum
case and introduce him into the Rachel Swanson Memorial Girls' Gymnasium shower room.

On May 22, 2003, the University Board of Regents issued the following order: "By unanimous vote, it is
directed that the remains of Honest John Barlow be removed from the University museum and conveyed
to the University's Lieutenant James Scott III Memorial Biological Laboratories and there be securely
locked in a specially prepared vault. It is further directed that all possible measures for the preservation of
these remains be taken by the Laboratory administration and that access to these remains be denied to all
persons except qualified scholars authorized in writing by the Board. The Board reluctantly takes this
action in view of recent notices and plwtographs in the nation's

press which, to say the least, reflect but small credit upon the

University."



It was far from his field, but Hawkins understood what had happened-an early and accidental blundering
onto the bare bones of the Levantman shock anesthesia, which had since been replaced by other
methods. To bring subjects out of Levantman shock, you let them have a squirt of simple saline in the
trigeminal nerve. Interesting. And now about that bronze- He heaved the pick into the rotting green salts,
expecting no resistance, and almost fractured his wrist. Something down there was solid. He began to
flake off the oxides.

A half hour of work brought him down to phosphor bronze, a huge casting of the almost incorruptible
metal. It had weakened structurally over the centuries; he could fit the point of his pick under a corroded
boss and pry off great creaking and grumbling striae of the stuff.

Hawkins wished he had an archaeologist with him but didn't dream of returning to his shop and caffing
one to take over the find. He was an all-around man: by choice, and in his free time, an artist in clay and
glaze; by necessity, an automotive, electronics and atomic engineer who could also swing a project in
traffic control, individual and group psychology, architecture or tool design. He didn't yell for a specialist
every time something out of his line came up; there were so few with so much to do.

He trenched around his find, discovering that it was a great brick-shaped bronze mass with an excitingly
hollow sound. A long strip of moldering metal from one of the long vertical faces pulled away, exposing