"Olaf Stapledon - Collected Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

Something he was saying recaptured her attention. He seemed to be annoyed that she had not been
listening. He was all worked up about something. She heard him say, "I know you despise me, but you're
making a big mistake. I tell you I have powers. I didn't intend to let you into my secret, yet; but, damn it,
I will. I'm finding out a lot about the power of mind over matter. I can control matter at a distance, just by
willing it. I'm going to be a sort of modern magician. I've even killed things by just willing it."

Helen, who was a medical student, prided herself on her shrewd materialism. She laughed
contemptuously.

His face flushed with anger, and he said, "Oh very well! I'll have to show you."

On a bush a robin was singing. The young man's gaze left the girl's face and settled intently on the robin.
"Watch that bird," he said. His voice was almost a whisper. Presently the bird stopped singing, and after
looking miserable for a while, with its head hunched into its body, it dropped from the tree without
opening its wings. It lay on the grass with its legs in the air, dead.

Jim let out a constricted squawk of triumph, staring at his victim. Then he turned his eyes on Helen.
Mopping his pasty face with his handkerchief, he said, "That was a good turn. I've never tried it on a bird
before, only on flies and beetles and a frog."

The girl stared at him silently, anxious not to seem startled. He set about telling her his secret. She was
not bored any more.

He told her that a couple of years earlier he had begun to be interested in "all this paranormal stuff." He
had been to séances and read about psychical research. He wouldn't have bothered if he hadn't
suspected he had strange powers himself. He was never really interested in spooks and thought
transference and so on. What fascinated him was the possibility that a mind might be able to affect matter
directly. "Psychokinesis," they called this power; and they knew very little about it. But he didn't care a
damn about the theoretical puzzles. All he wanted was power. He told Helen about the queer
experiments that had been done in America with dice. You threw the dice time after time, and you willed
them to settle with the two sixes uppermost. Generally they didn't; but when you had done a great many
experiments you totted up the results and found that there had been more sixes than should have turned
up by sheer chance. It certainly looked as though the mind really had some slight influence. This opened
up terrific possibilities.

He began to do little experiments on his own, guided by the findings of the researchers, but also by some
of his own ideas. The power was fantastically slight, so you had to test it out in situations where the tiniest
influence would have detectable results, just tipping the scales.

He didn't have much success with the dice, because (as he explained) he never knew precisely what he
had to do. The dice tumbled out too quickly for him. And so he only had the slight effect that the
Americans had reported. So he had to think up new tricks that would give him a better opening. He had
had a scientific training, so he decided to try to influence chemical reactions and simple physical
processes. He did many experiments and learned a lot. He prevented a spot of water from rusting a
knife. He stopped a crystal of salt from dissolving in water. He formed a minute crystal of ice in a drop of
water and finally froze the whole drop by simply "willing away" all the heat, in fact by stopping all the
molecular movement.

He told Helen of his first success at killing, a literally microscopic success. He brewed some very