"Feedback" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

Behind the closed eyes, vertigo, spinning fragments of the world. NAMES, MR. DUNNER. NAMES, MR. DUNNER. The yammering of insane voices shouting fear and hate and defensive rationalization. The faces which had been friendly, their mouths stretched open, shouting, their heavy fists coming— Impressions of changes of expression and mood passing over a crowded sea of upturned faces, marionettes being pulled by the nerve strings of one imbecile mind. Whirling and confusion—pain.

Somewhere far down in the whirlpool lay the quiet cool voice that would bring help.

He went down to it.

He was young, listening to the cool slow voice. The instructor standing before the class saying quietly: “It is easy. Your adult bodies have already learned subtle and precise associations of the cause and effect chains of sensations from within the body. The trick of making any activity voluntary is to bring one link of the chain to consciousness. We bring up the end link by duplicating its sensations.”

And a little later the instructor sitting on the edge of his cot with a tray of hypos, picking one up, saying softly, “This one is for you, Bill, because you’re such a stubborn fool. We call it suspenser.” The prick of the needle in his arm. The voice continuing. “One of your steroids. It can produce coma with no breathing or noticeable pulse. Remember the taste that will come on your tongue. Remember the taste. Remember the sensations. You can do this again.” The voice was hypnotic. “If you ever need to escape, if you ever need to play possum to escape, you will remember.”

The needle was withdrawn. After a time the voice of the instructor was at the next cot, speaking quietly while the blackness came closing in, his heartbeat dimming, dwindling, the strange familiar taste—

Somewhere out of time came pain, searing and incredible.

Ignore it… ignore it—Concentrate on the taste. The taste—The heartbeat dwindling Out of the dreaming distance a face swam close, twisted by some odd mixture of emotions.

“Confess. Get it over with.”

Heartbeat dwindling

He managed a whisper: “Hello, Bruce.” A ghost of laughter touched lightly. “I know… you—” A small boy taunt, mocking and then sad. The face jerked itself away and then pain came again, but it was infinitely distant now, and he was floating slowly farther and farther away down a long tunnel—



Night wind stirred across the empty picnic ground. It had been deserted a long time—the light and sound and trampling footsteps gone away, leaving a little whimper of wind. Stars glittered down coldly.

Up on the platform something moved.

When Dr. Bayard Bawling, general practitioner and police coroner, came home at five a. m., he saw the humped form of a man sitting on his doorstep in the dark. He approached and bent forward to see who it was.

“Hello, Bill.”

Dunner stirred suddenly as if he had been over the edge of sleep.

“Hello, Doc.”

Bawling was a stoutish kindly man. He sat down beside Dunner and picked up his wrist between sensitive fingertips. He spoke quietly. “It happened tonight, eh?”

“Yes, tonight.”

“How was it?” The doctor’s voice roughened slightly.

“Pretty bad.”

“I’m sorry. I would have been there if I could.” In his bag he carried a small supply of cortocananoxidase, the life suspender, “death,” and a small jet hypo, a flesh-colored rubber ball with a hollow needle which could be clenched in a fist with the needle between the fingers and injected with the appearance of a blow. Perhaps many doctors had carried such a thing as a matter of mercy since the hangings and burnings had begun.

“I know,” Dunner smiled faintly in the dark.

“I was working on a hard delivery. No one told me about the trial.”