Читать книгу The Science Fiction Anthology онлайн

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Drake leaned over and whispered to Sorensen, “Stall him. Give me another ten minutes. I think I’ve found the trouble.”

Sorensen said into the walkie-talkie, “We’d like to know a little more about the Quedak Cooperation.”

“You can find out best by joining.”

“We’d rather have a little more information on it first.”

“It is an indescribable state,” the Quedak said in an urgent, earnest, eager voice. “Can you imagine yourself as yourself and yet experiencing an entirely new series of sensory networks? You would, for example, experience the world through the perceptors of a dog as he goes through the forest following an odor which to him—and to you—is as clear and vivid as a painted line. A hermit crab senses things differently. From him you experience the slow interaction of life at the margin of sea and land. His time-sense is very slow, unlike that of a bird of paradise, whose viewpoint is spatial, rapid, cursory. And there are many others, above and below the earth and water, who furnish their own specialized viewpoints of reality. Their outlooks, I have found, are not essentially different from those of the animals that once inhabited Mars.”