"Theodore Sturgeon - Microcosmic God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

MICROCOSMIC GOD


MICROCOSMIC GOD

by Theodore Sturgeon

Here is a story about a man who had too much power, and a man who took too
much, but don’t worry; I’m not going political on you. The man who had the
power was named James Kidder and the other was his banker.
Kidder was quite a guy. He was a scientist and he lived on a small island off the
New England coast all by him-self. He wasn’t the dwarfed little gnome of a mad
scientist you read about. His hobby wasn’t personal profit, and he wasn’t a
megalomaniac with a Russian name and no scruples. He wasn’t insidious, and he
wasn’t even partic-ularly subversive. He kept his hair cut and his nails clean and
lived and thought like a reasonable human being. He was slightly on the baby-
faced side; he was inclined to be a hermit; he was short and plump and-brilliant.
His spe-cialty was biochemistry, and he was always called Mr. Kidder. Not “Dr.”
Not “Professor.” Just Mr. Kidder.
He was an odd sort of apple and always had been. He had never graduated from
any college or university be-cause he found them too slow for him, and too rigid
in their approach to education. He couldn’t get used to the idea that perhaps his
professors knew what they were talk-ing about. That went for his texts, too. He
was always ask-ing questions, and didn’t mind very much when they were
embarrassing. He considered Gregor Mendel a bungling liar, Darwin an amusing
philosopher, and Luther Burbank a sensationalist. He never opened his mouth
without leav-ing his victim feeling breathless. If he was talking to some-one who
had knowledge, he went in there and got it, leav-ing his victim breathless. If he
was talking to someone whose knowledge was already in his possession, he only
asked repeatedly, “How do you know?” His most delect-able pleasure was cutting
a fanatical eugenicist into conversational ribbons. So people left him alone and
never, never asked him to tea. He was polite, but not politic.
He had a little money of his own, and with it he leased the island and built himself
a laboratory. Now I’ve men-tioned that he was a biochemist. But being what he
was, he couldn’t keep his nose in his own field. It wasn’t too remarkable when he
made an intellectual excursion wide enough to perfect a method of crystallizing
Vitamin B1 profitably by the ton-if anyone wanted it by the ton. He got a lot of

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money for it. He bought his island outright and put eight hundred men to work on
an acre and a half of his ground, adding to his laboratory and building equipment.
He got to messing around with sisal fiber, found out how to fuse it, and boomed
the banana industry by producing a practically unbreakable cord from the stuff.
You remember the popularizing demonstration he put on at Niagara, don’t you?
That business of running a line of the new cord from bank to bank over the rapids
and suspending a ten-ton truck from the middle of it by razor edges resting on the
cord? That’s why ships now moor themselves with what looks like heaving line,