S is for Space. Ray Bradbury

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ man well fed for three days. This x-liquid circulated through the body until it was actually needed, when it was seized upon and used. More serviceable than fat. Much more!

      Rockwell glowed with his discovery. Smith had enough x-liquid stored in him to last months and months more. Self-sustaining.

      McGuire, when told, contemplated his paunch sadly.

      “I wish I stored my food that way.”

      That wasn’t all. Smith needed little air. What air he had he seemed to acquire by an osmotic process through his skin. And he used every molecule of it. No waste.

      “And,” finished Rockwell, “eventually Smith’s heart might even take vacations from beating, entirely!”

      “Then he’d be dead,” said McGuire.

      “To you and I, yes. To Smith—maybe. Just maybe. Think of it, McGuire. Collectively, in Smith, we have a self-purifying blood stream demanding no replenishment but an interior one for months, having little breakdown and no elimination of wastes whatsoever because every molecule is utilized, self-evolving, and fatal to any and all microbic life. All this, and Hartley speaks of degeneration!”

      Hartley was irritated when he heard of the discoveries. But he still insisted that Smith was degenerating. Dangerous.

      McGuire tossed his two cents in. “How do we know that this isn’t some super-microscopic disease that annihilates all other bacteria while it works on its victim. After all—malarial fever is sometimes used surgically to cure syphilis; why not a new bacillus that conquers all?”

      “Good point,” said Rockwell. “But we’re not sick, are we?”

      “It may have to incubate in our bodies.”

      “A typical old-fashioned doctor’s response. No matter what happens to a man, he’s ‘sick’—if he varies from the norm. That’s your idea, Hartley,” declared Rockwell, “not mine. Doctors aren’t satisfied unless they diagnose and label each case. Well, I think that Smith’s healthy; so healthy you’re afraid of him.”

      “You’re crazy,” said McGuire.

      “Maybe. But I don’t think Smith needs medical interference. He’s working out his own salvation. You believe he’s degenerating. I say he’s growing.”

      “Look at Smith’s skin,” complained McGuire.

      “Sheep in wolf’s clothing. Outside, the hard, brittle epidermis. Inside, ordered regrowth, change. Why? I’m on the verge of knowing. These changes inside Smith are so violent that they need a shell to protect their action. And as for you, Hartley, answer me truthfully, when you were young, were you afraid of insects, spiders, things like that?”

      “Yes.”

      “There you are. A phobia. A phobia you use against Smith. That explains your distaste for Smith’s change.”

      In the following weeks, Rockwell went back over Smith’s life carefully. He visited the electronics lab where Smith had been employed and fallen ill. He probed the room where Smith had spent the first weeks of his “illness” with Hartley in attendance. He examined the machinery there. Something about radiations …

      While he was away from the sanitarium, Rockwell locked Smith tightly, and had McGuire guard the door in case Hartley got any unusual ideas.

      The details of Smith’s twenty-three years were simple. He had worked for five years in the electronics lab, experimenting. He had never been seriously sick in his life.

      And as the days went by Rockwell took long walks in the dry-wash near the sanitarium, alone. It gave him time to think and solidify the incredible theory that was becoming a unit in his brain.

      And one afternoon he paused by a night-blooming jasmine outside the sanitarium, reached up, smiling, and plucked a dark shining object off of a high branch. He looked at the object and tucked it in his pocket. Then he walked into the sanitarium.

      He summoned McGuire in off the veranda. McGuire came. Hartley trailed behind, threatening, complaining. The three of them sat in the living quarters of the building.

      Rockwell told them.

      “Smith’s not diseased. Germs can’t live in him. He’s not inhabited by banshees or weird monsters who’ve ‘taken over’ his body. I mention this to show I’ve left no stone untouched. I reject all normal diagnoses of Smith. I offer the most important, the most easily accepted possibility of—delayed hereditary mutation.”

      “Mutation?” McGuire’s voice was funny.

      Rockwell held up the shiny dark object in the light.

      “I found this on a bush in the garden. It’ll illustrate my theory to perfection. After studying Smith’s symptoms, examining his laboratory, and considering several of these”—he twirled the dark object in his fingers—“I’m certain. It’s metamorphosis. It’s regeneration, change, mutation after birth. Here. Catch. This is Smith.”

      He tossed the object to Hartley. Hartley caught it.

      “This is the chrysalis of a caterpillar,” said Hartley.

      Rockwell nodded. “Yes, it is.”

      “You don’t mean to infer that Smith’s a—chrysalis?”

      “I’m positive of it,” replied Rockwell.

      Rockwell stood over Smith’s body in the darkness of evening. Hartly and McGuire sat across the patient’s room, quiet, listening. Rockwell touched Smith softly. “Suppose that there’s more to life than just being born, living seventy years, and dying. Suppose there’s one more great step up in man’s existence, and Smith has been the first of us to make that step.

      “Looking at a caterpillar, we see what we consider a static object. But it changes to a butterfly. Why? There are no final theories explaining it. It’s progress, mainly. The pertinent thing is that a supposedly unchangeable object weaves itself into an intermediary object, wholly unrecognizable, a chrysalis, and emerges a butterfly. Outwardly the chrysalis looks dead. This is misdirection. Smith has misdirected us, you see. Outwardly, dead. Inwardly, fluids whirlpool, reconstruct, rush about with wild purpose. From grub to mosquito, from caterpillar to butterfly, from Smith to—?”

      “Smith a chrysalis?” McGuire laughed heavily.

      “Yes.”

      “Humans don’t work that way.”

      “Stop it, McGuire. This evolutionary step’s too great for your comprehension. Examine this body and tell me anything else. Skin, eyes, breathing, blood flow. Weeks of assimilating food for his brittle hibernation. Why did he eat all that food, why did he need that x-liquid in his body except for his metamorphosis? And the cause of it all was—radiations. Hard radiations from Smith’s laboratory equipment. Planned or accidental I don’t know. It touched some part of his essential gene-structure, some part of the evolutionary structure of man that wasn’t scheduled for working for thousands of years yet, perhaps.”

      “Do you think that some day all men—?”

      “The maggot СКАЧАТЬ