"Chronicles of Chaos 01 - Orphans of Chaos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wright John C)

If so, he succeeded beyond his dreams. This boy, whom I had never really liked, now seemed inexpressibly powerful to me: manly, potent, confident. I will not tell you all my wild thoughts at that moment But I wanted him to kiss me. Worse yet, I wanted not to want it, and to have him steal a kiss from me nonetheless.
I did not apologize, but snapped defiantly at him, "Do your worst!" And I tossed my head and yanked at my wrists in his grip. My fists seemed so little compared to his, and his grip seemed as strong as manacles. I felt entirely powerless, but the sensation seemed oddly intoxicating, rather than dreadful.
He did not do his worst. Instead, baffled, he stood up sud-denly, releasing me, and seemed suddenly a boy again, a child I could defeat. I remember we raced back toward the house, apples in our hands. We had just enough that we could throw one or two at each other, trying to bruise shins and legs.
And I won that race, that time, but he grinned and tried to make me believe he had allowed me to win.
Strangely enough, I knew he thought he was lying. And I knew he had not been.
2
The Experiment
I do not know how young I was when I performed the experi-ment that required me to conclude that something was wrong in my life.
Victor—so I may call him, though he was still called Primus at the time—had grown a trace of down on his upper lip, finer than the fuzz of a peach. With even this small hint of manhood, he seemed more our leader than before, and there was a newfound glamour to him that touched my heart and troubled my dreams.
We had crept by stealth from the orphanage grounds, and stood among the rocks and bald hills of the West. Below us and to the East, we could see the lights from the Main House, the servants' quarters, the outbuildings, the stables.
Dr. Fell had bought Victor the instrument he was using for his experiment from a scientific catalogue. At the time, I thought it normal and unexceptional. Now, I realize that such an instrument was fabulously expensive: a piece of precision machinery even an observatory would envy.
The moon rose not long after sunset, and we pointed the lenses of the instrument to the East. Victor held his eye to the eyepiece and made minute adjustments to the vernier dials. He thumbed a red switch with a grimace of satisfaction.
He said, "An internal computer will track the path of the moon as it rises, and send out periodic pulses. We want to gather a number of samples, to correct for the different cords of atmosphere the signal passes through. The return signal is re-ceived by the large dish on the tripod over mere, whose motors are slaved to these wheels here. And voila!"
A numerical readout lit up. It was two point something something. 2.8955. Almost three seconds.
I said, "What now?"
He said, "And now we wait four hours."
"Did you bring anything to read?"
He just looked at me oddly.
"Or smoke?" I said.
"You are too young to smoke. Besides, it's bad for you."
"Quentin said you tried it. You experimented with it."
He shook his head. "It wasn't me. Trying things common sense abundantly demonstrates are bad for you is not an experiment; such things show you nothing but what your own tastes are. That does not constitute knowledge. This is an experiment!"
"Then who was it?"
"Who was what?"
"Quentin said he smelled smoke in the boys' bathroom. Cig-arette smoke."
He looked at me with scathing condescension, but said nothing.
"What?" I said.
"Logic. If it wasn't me, and it wasn't Quentin, and it wasn't a girl, who was it?"
"Oh," I said, feeling sheepish.
Hours passed. I fidgeted. I paced. I complained about the cold. I sat on the ground, which made me colder. I asked him for his down jacket, which he doffed without a word and tossed to me. I rolled it up and used it as a pillow.
I must have slept.
I dreamed that I was on a boat. A man held me roughly in one arm, dangling me over the side. The boat pitched and tossed terribly; rain pelted my face and ran in icy ribbons down my flesh. The man held some sharp, horrible thing near my face: a knife, or something larger than a knife.
In the dream, the water, which had been black and rolling, webbed with white foam and spray, suddenly grew clear as crystal. A figure that was so large as to make our ship seem the size of a lifeboat was gliding beneath the waves, parallel to our course. The figure had his hands back along his sides and his head down; he did not kick his feet. Instead, the water streamed past him, like wind streaming past a man falling effortlessly through the air.
"Tell him to quell the storm," said the voice of the doctor in my ear.
The figure turned its head and regarded us both. Its eyes were lamps, eerie with a greenish light, and it had a third eye, made of metal, embedded in its forehead.
Instead of being terrified that I was going to be pitched over-board or stabbed, I was overcome with a painful embarrassment to realize that the gigantic figure was utterly nude and that, as he kept turning, I would soon see a penis larger than the member of an elephant, rippling through the water like a periscope. What made it more embarrassing was that the figure had Victor's features.
The third eye, the metal one, seemed to be the only one with a soul in it. In the senseless way things are known in dreams, I knew that the mere fact that it could see me with this eye meant he could speak to me, despite all the water between us, and the noise and wrack of the storm. "/ am embedding this message by means of cryptognosis into a preconsciousness level of your nervous system. The paradigms of Chaos have agreed only on this one point. We will wait for you..."
"Tell him to make the clouds move."
"What?"
"I said, I hope the clouds move. We need to get a clear read-ing when the moon reaches zenith."
I was awake again, with Victor, on the cold hillside. A knot-ted texture of charcoal-black and gleaming silver hung like a ship out of fairyland high above us. The cloud covered the moon, and limned the edges with swirls of argent.
Victor was still standing.
"How long have I been asleep?"
'Two hours, fourteen minutes."
"Oh." Silence.
Then I said, "Why are you doing this? We could get caught. It's not as if Michelson and Morley hadn't done this experiment one hundred years ago."
He said, "One hundred eight. They've been saying untrue things to us. The teachers. The readings we got from the interferometer in lab class had been meddled with. When I did the experiment under controlled conditions, I got results consistent with the theory that light is conveyed via luminiferous aether."
I sat up. "Are you saying mere's no Einsteinian relativity? But there have been other experiments. The procession of the axis of Mercury. Cesium clocks in a fast-flying airplane. Light was seen to bend around the sun during an eclipse."
"We have only hearsay for that."
I was astonished. The sheer magnitude of his skepticism was beyond words. It was like an elephant I had seen once during a rare field trip to Swansea Zoo. As soon as you think you under-stand how big it is, you look again, and it is bigger.