"Henry Kuttner - Three Blind Mice UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

"So you don't like it," he said. There was no danger in speech; to a telepath, with barrier raised, it was more secret than thought.
"No," she said. "I suppose it takes conditioning."
"But you're a biologist."
"Rabbits and guinea pigs. Even those make me blush sometimes. But-carnivores."
"Tackle a weasel sometime," he suggested. "It's pure insanity. Come on." He led her out of the crowd, toward the terrace where canopied tables were scattered. "Have a cocktail?"
"Thanks." She glanced back at the shark's tank. Barton nodded; it could be bad, if one wasn't used to it. But he was used to it.
"Shall we go somewhere else?" he asked, pausing in the act of drawing out a chair for her. "A zoo can be pretty uncomfortable if you aren't-"
"No. It's safer here. We've got to talk, and we can do it pretty freely in a place like this. None of Us would come here for pleasure." With her mind she "glanced" around at the encircling madness of beast-thoughts, then blurred the surface of her mind again as a protection and smiled at Barton appealingly.
They had met, as all Baldies do, upon a footing of instant semi-intimacy. Nontelepaths may take weeks of friendship to establish a knowledge of one another's character; Baldies do it automatically at first contact, often before they meet at all. Often, indeed, the knowledge formed in first mental meeting is more accurate than later impressions colored by the appearance and physical mannerisms of the telepaths. As non-Baldies, these two would have been Miss Connaught and Mr. Barton for awhile. But as telepaths they had automatically, unconsciously summed one another up while Barton was still in the air; they knew they were mutually pleasant in a contact of minds. They thought of one another instantly as Sue and Dave. No non-Baldy, eavesdropping on their meeting, would have believed they were not old friends; it would have been artificial had the two behaved otherwise than this, once their minds had accepted each other.
Sue said aloud, "I'll have a Martini. Do you mind if I talk? It helps." And she glanced around, physically this time, at the cages. "I don't see how you stand it, even with your training. I should think you could drive a Baldie perfectly gibbering just by shutting him up in a zoo overnight."
Barton grinned, and automatically his mind began sorting out the vibrations from all around him: the casual trivialities from the monkeys, broken by a pattern of hysteria as a capuchin caught the scent of jaguar; the primal, implacable vibrations from the panthers and lions, with their undertone of sheer, proud confidence; the gentle, almost funny radiations from the seals. Not that they could be called reasoning thoughts; the brains were those of animals, but basically the same colloid organism existed under fur and scales as existed under the auburn wig of Sue Connaught.
After a while, over Martinis, she asked, "Have you ever fought a duel?"
Barton instinctively glanced around. He touched the small dagger at his belt. "I'm a Baldy, Sue."
"So you haven't."
"Naturally not." He didn't trouble to explain; she knew the reason as well as he did. For Baldies could not risk capitalizing on their special ability except in very limited cases. A tele-path can always win a duel. If David hadn't killed Gpliath, eventually the Philistines would have mobbed the giant out of sheer jealousy. Had Goliath been smart, he would have walked with his knees bent.
Sue said, "That's all right. I've had to be very careful. This is so confidential I don't know who-" Her barrier was still up strongly.
"I've been in Africa for six months. Maybe I'm not up with current events." Both of them were feeling the inadequacy of words, and it made them impatient.
"Not current... future. Things are ... help from ... qualify-" She stopped and forced herself into the slower grammatical form of communication. "I've got to get help somewhere, and it's got to be one of Us. Not only that, but a very special kind of person. You qualify."
"How?"
"Because you're a naturalist," she said. "I've looked the field over, but you know what sort of work We usually get. Sedentary occupations. Semantics experts, medical and psychiatric internes, biologists like me, police assistants-that came closer, but I need a man who... who can get the jump on another Baldy."
Barton stared and frowned. "A duel?"
"I think so," she said. "I can't be sure yet. But it seems the only way. This must be completely secret, Dave, absolutely secret. If a word of it ever got out, it would be ... very bad for Us."
He knew what she meant, and pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. That shadow always hung over every Baldy.
"What is it?"
She didn't answer directly. "You're a naturalist. That's fine. What I need is a man who can meet a telepath on slightly more than equal terms. No non-Baldy would do, even if I could talk about this to a non-Baldy. What I've got to get is a man with a fast-moving mind who's also trained his body to respond faster than instantly."
"Uh-huh."
"There weren't many," she said. "Even when minds move at the same speed, there's always a fractional difference in muscular response. And we're not too well trained. Games of competitive skill-"
"I've thought of that," Barton said. "More than once, too. Any game based on war is unsuitable for Us."
"Any game in which you face your opponent. I like golf, but I can't play tennis."
"Well," Barton told her, "I don't box or wrestle. Or play chess, for that matter. But skip-handball--have you seen that?"
She shook her head.
"The backboard's full of convolutions; you never know which way the ball would bounce. And the board's in sections that keep sliding erratically. You can control the force, but not the direction. That's one way. It's something new, and naturally it isn't advertised, but a friend of mine's got one at his place. A man named Denham."
"He told me about you."
"I thought so."
"Uh-huh. For fifteen years you've been catching everything from tigers to king cobras. That takes good timing, the way you do it. Any man who can outguess a king cobra-"
"Watch your barrier," Barton said sharply. "I caught something then. Is it that bad?"
She drew a shaky breath. "My control's lousy. Let's get out of here."
Barton led her across the zoo's main area. As they passed the shark's tank he sent a quick glance down, and met the girl's eyes worriedly.
"Like that, eh?"
She nodded. "Like that. But you can't put Them in cages."
Over catfish and Shasta white wine she told him-
You can't put Them in cages. Shrewd, dangerous, but very careful now. They were the middle group of the three telepathic assortments. The same mutation, but... but!
The hard radiations had been plain dynamite. When you implant a completely new function in the delicate human brain, you upset a beautiful and long-standing balance. So there had been three groups: one was a complete failure, thrust into the mental borderland of insanity, dementia prae-cox and paranoia. Another group, to which Sue Connaught and
Barton belonged-the vast majority-were able to adjust to a nontelepathic world. They wore wigs.
But the middle group was paranoid-and sane.
Among these telepaths were found the maladjusted egotists, the ones who for a long time had refused to wear wigs, and who had bragged of their superiority. They had the cunning and the utter self-justification of the true paranoid type, and were basically antisocial. But they were not mad.
And you can't put Them in cages. For they were telepaths, and how can you cage the mind?
They finished with Brazilian chocolate cake, demi-tasse and Mississippi liqueur, made by the monks of Swanee monastery. Barton touched his cigarette tip to the igniter paper on the pack. He inhaled smoke.
"It's not a big conspiracy, then."
"These things start small. A few men-but you see the danger."