"Lewis Padgett - When the Bough Breaks 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Padgett Lewis)

"Yeah," Calderon said. And he went away, muttering, to join Myra in the kitchen.
Alexander worked with facility at his gadgets, his pudgy fingers already stronger and surer. He still had an illicit passion for the blue ovoid, but under Bordent's watchful eye he could use it only along the restricted lines laid out by his mentors. When the lesson was finished, Quat selected a few of the objects and locked them in a cupboard, as was his custom. The rest he left on the carpet to provide exercise for Alexander's ingenuity.
"He develops," Bordent said. "Today we've made a great step."
Myra and Calderon came in in time to hear this. "What goes?" he asked.
"A psychic bloc-removal. Alexander will no longer need to sleep."
"What?" Myra said.
"He won't require sleep. It's an artificial habit anyway. The super race has no need of it."
"He won't sleep any more, eh?" Calderon said. He had grown a little pale.
"Correct. He'll develop faster now, twice as fast."


At 3:30 a. m. Calderon and Myra lay in bed, wide awake, looking through the open door in to the full blaze of light where Alexander played. Seen there clearly, as if upon a lighted stage, he did not look quite like himself any more. The difference was subtle, but it was there. Under the golden down his head had changed shape slightly, and there was a look of intelligence and purpose upon the blobby features. It was not an attractive look. It didn't belong there. It made Alexander look less like a super-baby than a debased oldster. All a child's normal cruelty and selfishness-perfectly healthy, natural traits in the developing infant-flickered across Alexander's face as he played absorbedly with solid crystal blocks which he was fitting into one another like a Chinese puzzle. It was quite a shocking face to watch.
Calderon heard Myra sigh beside him.
"He isn't our Alexander any more," she said. "Not a bit."
Alexander glanced up and his face suddenly suffused. The look of paradoxical age and degeneracy upon it vanished as he opened his mouth and bawled with rage, tossing the blocks in all directions. Calderon watched one roll through the bedroom door and come to rest upon the carpet, spilling out of its solidity a cascade of smaller and smaller solid blocks that tumbled winking toward him. Alexander's cries filled the apartment. After a moment windows began to slam across the court, and presently the phone rang. Calderon reached for it, sighing.
When he hung up he looked across at Myra and grimaced. Above the steady roars he said, "Well, we have notice to move."
Myra said, "Oh. Oh, well."
"That about covers it."
They were silent for a moment. Then Calderon said, "Nineteen years more of it. I think we can expect about that. They did say he'd mature at twenty, didn't they?"
"He'll be an orphan long before then," Myra groaned. "Oh, my head! I think I caught cold when he teleported us up to the roof just before dinner. Joe, do you suppose we're the first parents who ever got... got caught like this?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, was there ever another super-baby before Alexander? It does seem like a waste of a lot of tolerance if we're the first to need it."
"We could use a lot more. We'll need a lot." He said nothing more for awhile, but he lay there thinking and trying not to hear his super-child's rhythmic howling. Tolerance. Every parent needed a great deal of it. Every child was intolerable from time to time. The race had certainly needed parental love in vast quantities to permit its infants to survive. But no parents before had ever been tried consistently up to the very last degree of tolerance. No parents before had ever had to face twenty years of it, day and night, strained to the final notch. Parental love is a great and all-encompassing emotion, but-
"I wonder," he said thoughtfully. "I wonder if we are the first."
Myra's speculations had been veering. "I suppose it's like tonsils and appendix," she murmured. "They've outlived their use, but they still hang on. This tolerance is vestigial in reverse. It's been hanging on all these millenniums, waiting for Alexander."
"Maybe. I wonder-Still, if there ever had been an Alexander before now, we'd have heard of him. So-"
Myra rose on one elbow and looked at her husband. "You think so?" she said softly. "I'm not so sure. I think it might have happened before."
Alexander suddenly quieted. The apartment rang with silence for a moment. Then a familiar voice, without words, spoke in both their brains simultaneously.
"Get me some more milk. And I want it just warm, not hot."
Joe and Myra looked at one another again, speechless. Myra sighed and pushed the covers back. "I'll go this time," she said. "Something new, eh? I-"
"Don't dawdle," said the wordless voice, and Myra jumped and gave a little shriek. Electricity crackled audibly through the room, and Alexander's bawling laughter was heard through the doorway.
"He's about as civilized now as a well-trained monkey, I suppose," Joe remarked, getting out of bed. "I'll go. You crawl back in. And in another year he may reach the elevation of a bushman. After that, if we're still alive, we'll have the pleasure of living with a super-powered cannibal. Eventually he may work up to the level of practical joker. That ought to be interesting." He went out, muttering to himself.


Ten minutes later, returning to bed, Joe found Myra clasping her knees and looking into space.
"We aren't the first, Joe," she said, not glancing at him. "I've been thinking. I'm pretty sure we aren't."
"But we've never heard of any supermen developing-"
She turned her head and gave him a long, thoughtful look. "No," she said.
They were silent. Then, "Yes, I see what you mean," he nodded.
Something crashed in the living room. Alexander chuckled and the sound of splintering wood was loud in the silence of the night. Another window banged somewhere outside.
"There's a breaking point," Myra said quietly. "There's got to be."
"Saturation," Joe murmured. "Tolerance saturation-or something. It could have happened."
Alexander trundled into sight, clutching something blue. He sat down and began to fiddle with bright wires. Myra rose suddenly.
"Joe, he's got that blue egg! He must have broken into the cupboard."
Calderon said, "But Quat told him-"
"It's dangerous!"
Alexander looked at them, grinned, and bent the wires into a cradle-shape the size of the egg.
Calderon found himself out of bed and halfway to the door. He stopped before he reached it. "You know," he said slowly, "he might hurt himself with that thing."
"We'll have to get it away from him," Myra agreed, heaving herself up with tired reluctance.
"Look at him," Calderon urged. "Just look."