"S. P. Somtow - Absent Thee From Felicity Awhile.." - читать интересную книгу автора (Somtow S. P)

from M.I.T. I talk to them, you know.”
“No kidding!”
“Hey, really! Listen, come here,” he pulled me roughly over to
the pole, which had stopped glowing. “Just sit down here, relax
now, touch the pole. Totem pole, divine antenna, whatever. Can’t
you hear anything… ?”
Hello.
I was shivering. The voice was so close; it was speaking inside
me. I drew back quickly.
“Hey, did you know they have many doctors, that each color
shows their status based on age? Did you know that, huh? Did you
know they don’t join up with the collective consciousness until
they’re almost half a billion years old, that they have these learning
centers all over the galaxy, that they originally crossed over from
the Great Nebula in Andromeda? No kidding, man!”
I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Here, touch it again, it isn’t so bad the second time.” He was
twitching all over, a bundle of nerves. “Sorry I’m acting like this.
It’s my only chance to act normal, you see, the rest of the day I’m
either stoned or asleep, according to the script I can’t wait till we all
wake up!”
I reached out. Hello.
“Isn’t there any way we can resist them?”
“What for? Don’t you want to live forever? This is just a sort
of Purgatory, isn’t it? We all get to go to heaven.”
“But suppose I wanted to, you know, contradict them, or
something.”
“Dunno. They can’t control everything.” He paused for a
moment, but then launched himself into a stream of information
again, as though I’d fed him another quarter.
“I have the general equations worked out.” He flashed a bit of
paper in front of my face, then thrust it back into his pocket—“but
you obviously have to be in control of unified field theory, and
even then there’s the power source to worry about. I have a couple
of theories—f’rinstance, if they had sort of a portable mini-quasar,
like, a miniature white hole worming through space-time into a
transdimensional universe, they could tap the energy, you see,
and—”
He had lost me. I touched the pole, and his voice faded into
nothingness. The buzzing intensified. Hello.
“We’re just dirt to you, laboratory animals,” I said bitterly. “I
wish it was back to the way it was.”
You can’t help being a lower being, you know. There’s nothing you or I
can do about that.
“Well, will you tell me one thing?” It suddenly occurred to
me that everyone had left The Hare Krishnas, hands linked, had
gone dancing off.
Sure.
“Is this thing really worth it, for us? Seven million years is a
long, long, time; it’s the same as eternity for all practical purposes.”