"Zelazny, Roger - Angel, Dark Angel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

“With a gigantic machine guarded by the Angel of Death! I know!”

“You are wrong. It would end with the Garden of Eden.”

She laughed.

“Now you know the story of my fresco.”

==========

He took her hand. “You may be right,” he said. “I don’t really know. I was only talking about how things seem to me.”

“And you may be right,” she said. “7 don’t really know… I just feel there should be something to counterbalance that wonderfully flexible mechanism which guides us so superbly that we are becoming the vegetables in that garden you would draw me.”

“Have you any suggestions?”

“Have you read any of my papers?”

“I’m afraid not. I fool around with my own garden and I play tennis. That’s about it.”

“I have proposed the thesis that man’s intelligence, extruded into the inanimate, has lost all that is human. Could you repair the machine that mixes our drinks, if it ceased to function?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are very unusual. Most people would call in a robot which specializes in small-appliance repairs.”

Stain shrugged.

“Not only have we given up this function of intelligent manipulation—but divorced from us and existing elsewhere, it turns and seeks to suppress what remains of it within ourselves.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why has life become a horizontal line, rather than an upward curve? One reason is that men of genius die young.”

“This I cannot believe.”

“I purposely published my most important papers recently and I was visited by the Angel of Death. This proved it to me.”

He smiled.

“You still live, so this could not be so.”

She returned his smile, and he lit two cigarettes and said, “On what subjects were the papers?”

“The Preservation of Sensibility.”

“An innocuous-seeming subject.”

“Perhaps.”