"Robert Rankin - Brentford 05 - The Brentford Chainstore Mas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rankin Robert)

apparently a howl a minute) the students gathered together their belongings and left the auditorium.
Dr Steven Malone stood alone before his black-

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board. Top of the tree, icing on the cake and ivory mouthpiece he might have been, but communicator of
wisdom to the young and impressionable he was not. He was a visionary and he had glimpsed THE BIG IDEA,
but getting this across to his students was proving tricky.
He had been leading up to his conviction that present-day scientists in the field of genetics (that field
with the big tree in the middle on which perched Dr Steven Malone) went about things in all the wrong
ways. They were obsessed with the study of present-day man's DNA, in order to discover its secrets.
But the secrets did not lie in the DNA of present-day man. Present-day man was a genetic mutation, an
evolutionary development. In order to learn the secrets of DNA you had to study it in its original form -
the form that had existed in the very beginning. You would have to study the DNA of Adam and Eve. Or
even go one better than that. God created man in his own image, so the DNA prototype was to be found in
God himself.
But how could anyone study the DNA of God?
And what might you find if you did?
These were the thoughts that obsessed Dr Steven Malone, that had driven him into the field of genetics
in the first place, and would drive him to his inevitable and devastating downfall.
But his downfall was still some months away.
Some years away, in fact, or even centuries, depending on just where you happened to be in time. So be
it only said that Dr Steven had a plan. It

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was a brave plan and a bold one. It was daring; it was dire. And had it not already been given away on the
cover of this book, it would have come as one hell of a surprise to the reader.
But such is the way of it, and so we must leave Dr Steven Malone for the present. A noble figure, all in
black and white, still bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mr Sidney Paget's renderings of Sherlock
Holmes.
Dr Steven stands in profile and points to something off the page.




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2
And a great wind came out of the East, as it were a burning cloud consuming all before it. And the sons
of Man did weep and wail and rend their garments, crying surely this is the breath of Pooley.
 'Surely this is the breath of Pooley?' Jim Pooley reread the computer print-out. 'How can this be?'
The obese genealogist leaned back in his creaking leather chair and clasped his plump fingers over an
expanse of tweedy waistcoat. 'How it can, I do not know,' said he. 'But there you have it, for what it's
worth.'
Jim, now breathing into his cupped hands and sniffing mightily, said, 'I might well have the twang of
the brewer's craft about the gums myself. But as to a burning cloud consuming all before it, that's a little
strong.'
'Hence all the weeping and wailing, I suppose.' The genealogist grinned.
'Are you sure it isn't a misinterpretation or something? These ancient scribes were subject to the

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occasional slip-up, you know. A transposed P here, a wayward ey round the corner.'