[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

As Modyun reached the street where he had originally
entered his four animal companions came charging out of
the building. As they saw him, Narrl, the fox-man, heaved a
sigh of relief, and they all stopped.
For a few moments, then, their voices made a confusion of
words, out of which Modyun was presently able to isolate a
few bits of information to the effect that they believed they
had lost him. Modyun stared at them thoughtfully. All four
radiated a kind of innocence, which made their story totally
acceptable to him. Whatever had happened, they were not re-
sponsible for it.
It begins to look, he thought, as if what happened was
equally simple. Quite accidentally, he had walked out of the
side door at a moment when as they now described it they
had paused and turned back to examine something. When
they looked around, he was gone.
But how did the hyena-man with an automatic pistol hap-
pen to be standing outside in that backyard? The coincidence
strained the imagination, but since no one knew who he was,
or that he was here, it had to be exactly that: coincidence.
Modyun felt his tense body relax with that realization.
He watched the four companions hasten off to their meet-
ing. First, they took a moving sidewalk to the vehicle street.
At the gesture of one of them, one of the cars pulled over.
They scrambled in, and doors shut. Moments later, the car
was out in the traffic. Modyun quickly lost sight of it
Feeling peaceful, yet slightly unhappy, he walked toward
the terraced apartments. The unhappiness bothered him a
little. Bodies, he thought, are really amazing. Incredibly, his
body missed his four companions. It had experienced a kind
of happiness in their company.
Goes to show how the minds of the original human beings
got befuddled. But what was astonishing to Modyun was that
the teaching machines had failed to prepare him for such pit-
falls. Whoever had programmed them had already forgotten
such details. Or perhaps, knowing, had ignored them.
He was still mentally shaking his head though he was not
actually worried over the discrepancy, when he arrived at
the street where the others lived, and where he hoped to live,
also. It relieved him to discover that the little house between
the bear-man and the jaguar-man was still unoccupied. As a
consequence of it being available, he wouldn't later have to
explain why he had moved since he wouldn't have to move.
He accordingly wasted no time, now, on further argument
with a machine. What he did was one of the indication tech-
niques by which the brain of man controlled matter. The
force which was thus instantly set in motion dissolved the
otherwise enduring electrical connections of this specific
door-unlocking relay system.
Since he was eminently logical, he did no damage to the
little switchboard by which a distant computer monitored the
tiny house. Simply, he unlocked the door. And the proof of
the unlocking came a moment later, very satisfyingly, when
he turned the knob, and pushed. The door swung open.
He could have entered, then. But, instead, he stood where
file:///F|/rah/A.%20E.%20Van%20Vogt/Van%20Vo...A.%20E%20-%20The%20Battle%20of%20Forever.txt (14 of 104) [2/2/03 11:24:40 PM]
file:///F|/rah/A.%20E.%20Van%20Vogt/Van%20Vogt,%20A.%20E%20-%20The%20Battle%20of%20Forever.txt
he was. And there was in him a feeling a feeling from the
mind to the body.
He stood there on the porch of that little housing unit, and
he looked out from its modest height over a portion of the
city of Hulee. And his feeling was that he was man, and
these others were not as he was. Most of them had con-
formed, and had not changed. Man's raising of them from
the animal depths where he had found them had not for the
majority been a springboard to a progressive development.
The biological marvels had been forced upon them.
Thereafter, chains of molecules had been coded to maintain
the alteration; and the coding had for thousands of years now
done its exact task.
But no more and no less. Modyun visualized the vast
masses of animal-men happily intermingling, going to the
food automats, punching in to their apartments, reporting to
computers, eagerly discussing the details of anything they
were programmed to do, or, as it had now developed, as they
had been mobilized to do by the hyena-men. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • alwayshope.keep.pl

    •