"Ken Rand - The Henry and the Martha" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rand Ken)

So, we’d saved out jobs, saved the exhibit—not what it used to be, but
enough—but we hadn’t solved the mystery.

Why had the Henry killed the Martha?

The Henry was insane. It couldn’t tell us because we were in the real world
and it had left that world, some experts contend, even as it killed the Martha, and
surely as it arranged the corpse in state on the bed.

I found the answer years later after I became Director. I found it in a report
our two medicals had prepared for Director’s Eyes Only after the murder. Three
people had seen what I now saw—the two medicals, and my predecessor.
 “These files are confidential,” my secretary had told me. “Director’s Eyes
Only.” She left the office, and I secured and shielded it. Then I opened the files.

The medicals, you see, had learned the Martha was pregnant when the Henry
killed it. There would be three. We knew the two humans copulated often, but we
understood human physiology too poorly. Why hadn’t it been impregnated in earlier
copulations? We would never know.

Also, how the Martha had kept its condition from us, we would never know,
but it did.

Kept us in the dark, but not the Henry.

Thus, the Henry had murdered the Martha, not to hurt the Martha, but to end
the life in its womb.

The Henry was the exhibit star, the Martha an afterthought. If you exhibit a
male human, so the thinking went, you ought to have a female too, for balance,
symmetry, and to keep the male active, animated—for study, and to please patrons.
We didn’t understand humans well enough to do more than guess.

Who knew the Henry would be jealous? Who knew that, threatened with the
prospect that the public might shift its ardor from it to the Martha—and to its
cub—it might strike out and—restore order? And go insane.

A pity. Three humans—male, female, and cub—would have been a wonderful
display. Patrons would have come from—well, everywhere.