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

stagnant water and put a drop on a slide. Then through the microscope he watched the swarm of
microorganisms milling about. Mostly they were like stumpy sausages, swimming with wavy tails. They
were of many sizes. He thought of them as elephants, cows, sheep, rabbits. His idea was that he might be
able to stop the chemical action in one of these little creatures and so kill it. He had read up a lot about
their inner workings, and he knew what key process he could best tackle. Well, the damned things kept
shifting about so fast he couldn't concentrate on anyone of them for long enough. He kept losing his victim
in the crowd. However, at last one of the "rabbits" swam into a less populous part of the slide, and he
fixed his attention on it long enough to do the trick. He willed the crucial chemical process to stop, and it
did stop. The creature stopped moving and stayed still indefinitely. It was almost certainly dead. His
success, he said, made him "feel like God."

Later he learned to kill flies and beetles by freezing their brains. Then he tried a frog, but had no success.
He didn't know enough physiology to find a minute key process to check. However, he read up a lot of
stuff, and at last he succeeded. He simply stopped the nerve current in certain fibres in the spinal cord
that controlled the heartbeat. It was this method also that he had used on the robin.

"That's just the beginning," he said. "Soon I shall have the world at my feet. And if you join up with me, it
will be at your feet too."

Throughout this monologue the girl had listened intently, tom between revulsion and fascination. There
was a kind of bad smell about it all, but one couldn't afford to be too squeamish in these days. Besides,
there was probably nothing in morality, anyhow. All the same, Jim was playing with fire. Strange, though,
how he seemed to have grown up while he was talking. Somehow he didn't look gawky and babyish
anymore. His excitement, and her knowledge that his power was real, had made him look thrillingly
sinister. But she decided to be cautious and aloof.

When at last Jim was silent, she staged a concealed yawn and said, "You're clever, aren't you! That was
a good trick you did, though a horrid one. If you go much further, you'll end on the gallows."

He snorted and said, "It's not like you to be a coward."

The taunt stung her. Indignantly she answered, "Don't be ridiculous! Why should I join with you, as you
call it, merely because you can kill a bird by some low trick or other?"

In Jim's life there had been certain events which he had not mentioned. They seemed to him irrelevant to
the matter in hand, but they were not really so at all. He had always been a weakling. His father, a
professional footballer, despised him and blamed the frail mother. The couple had lived a cat-and-dog life
almost since their honeymoon. At school Jim had been thoroughly bullied; and in consequence he had
conceived a deep hatred of the strong and at the same time an obsessive yearning to be strong himself.
He was a bright lad and had secured a scholarship at a provincial university. As an undergraduate, he
kept to himself, worked hard for a scientific degree, and aimed at a career of research in atomic physics.
Already his dominant passion was physical power, so he chose its most spectacular field. But somehow
his plans went awry. In spite of his reasonably good academic qualifications, he found himself stuck in a
low-grade job in an industrial lab, a job which he had taken on as a stopgap till he could capture a post in
one of the great institutions devoted to atomic physics. In this backwater, his naturally sour disposition
became embittered. He felt he was not getting a fair chance. Inferior men were outstripping him. Fate
was against him. In fact he developed something like a persecution mania. But the truth was that he was a
bad cooperator. He never developed the team spirit which is so necessary in the immensely complex
work of fundamental physical research. Also, he had no genuine interest in physical theory and was
impatient of the necessity of advanced theoretical study. What he wanted was power, power for himself