"Brian Lumley - Psychomech 01 - Psychomech" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

the man was deadly serious.
Finally Garrison said, ‘Come back in the body of your son? Usurp his mind, you mean? Return as Thomas
Schroeder?’
He sensed the other’s denial, the immediate shaking of his head. ‘No, no. That is quite impossible.’ (Again the air of
absolute sincerity, conviction.) ‘No, it would be more a sharing. I would be Heinrich, he would be me. And we would
go on together. But... I don’t have ten years. I don’t have ten months. Heinrich is a mere child, a baby. He knows
nothing. To come back in him, if it is at all possible, would be to lose myself. I would not know! Do you understand?’
‘In his untried mind the greater You would overflow, spill out. Only a spark of You would remain. Without even
knowing it he would evict You. Your identity would be gone forever.’
‘Exactly! Your grasp is amazing.’
The chill was now intense. Garrison could feel Schroeder leaning closer, the man’s hot unpleasant breath in his face.
He suddenly feared what Schroeder might say next. But when it .came it was anticlimax:
‘Richard, what of dreams?’
‘Dreams? What of them?’
‘Are you not a dreamer? Do you dream when you are asleep?’
‘Of course. I’ve had dreams, like anyone else. But not recent—’ He froze, the word incomplete. He drew air in a gasp,
pictured the industrialist’s fear-shiny face as he had seen it at the doors of the Europa in Belfast. Suddenly it fitted
perfectly over another face he had thought long banished in realms of nightmare.
A face in the sky - that of the man-God- bald-headed, with a high-domed forehead, eyes made huge through thick
lenses—
Garrison shook his head, but to no avail. More of that old dream came flowing back, unbidden except by Schroeder’s
question, flashing on his mind’s eye like stills from some old film.
A man with a crewcut, blond, standing beside a silver Mercedes atop an impossibly steep crag—
Garrison’s mind whirled.
‘Richard, are you all right?’ Schroeder’s voice, full of concern, seemed to come from a million miles away. It dragged
Garrison back to reality. But though the rest of his dream remained shrouded, those two definite images stayed sharp,
mirror-bright on his memory. The man-God’s face in the sky - Schroeder’s face - and the crewcut man with the
Mercedes, who could only be Willy Koenig. Those images and one other of a burning brown-paper parcel, a cube of
lashing energy and glaring, searing, blinding light and heat!
Schroeder’s fingers dug into his wrist. ‘Richard—!’
‘I’m ... all right. You woke something in me, that’s all. Something frightening. I had forgotten it, until now.’
‘What?’ Schroeder did not relax his grip. ‘What did I awake in you?’
‘A memory. I remembered a dream. A recurrent dream. Parts of it, anyway. A dream of you, and of Willy Koenig.’
Schroeder’s fascination was a tangible thing. ‘Oh? And when did this occur? When you knew you were coming out
here to see me?’
Garrison shook his head. ‘No, long before that. It was something that happened to me over a period of about three
weeks. A recurrent nightmare that came again and again. A warning. You were in it, and Koenig - and the bomb!’
‘The bomb?’ Koenig’s voice was a whisper.
Garrison nodded. ‘And the last time I dreamed it was -the night before the Eiiropa!’
‘The night before the Eur—’ the German repeated, his words fading into a sigh.
For the first time in his life, Richard Garrison was glad he was blind. Glad, at least, that he could not see the other’s
face. But he could still feel it. That look of amazement slowly turning to—
To what? Disbelief? Hope?
... Or triumph?

‘A hypnotist? Are you serious?’ Garrison had not yet learned that this was a question unworthy of his host. If
Schroeder said he would do something, he would do it.
‘With your permission, yes.’
‘But why? I don’t understand.’
They were now in the observatory at the top of Schroeder’s library building, seated at a large circular table where