The Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko Read Free Book Online Page A

you could get a good
discount. Twenty to thirty per cent. And if you could convince
the doctors it was good publicity, you could probably get away
with half a million!'
    'What for?' I asked. Thanks to my hairdresser, my hair wasn't
able to stand up on end.
    'It's just a fascinating idea,' Las explained. 'Imagine you want to
hammer in a nail. You just raise your fist and smash it down, and
the nail sinks into concrete. Those bones are titanium. Or say
someone tries to punch you . . . nah, of course, there are drawbacks.
And artificial organs aren't coming on too well yet. But the
general trend of progress looks good to me.'
    He poured us another glass.
    'It seems to me the trend of progress is in a different direction,'
I went on, sticking to my guns. 'We need to make greater use of
the potential abilities of our organisms. All those amazing things
that lie hidden inside us. Telekinesis, telepathy . . .'
    Las looked a bit put out by that. I was getting depressed too,
trying to play the idiot.
    'Can you read my thoughts?' he asked.
    'Not right now,' I confessed.
    'I don't think we ought to invent any extra dimensions of reality,'
Las explained. 'We've already known for a long time what man is
capable of. If people could read thoughts, levitate and do all that
other nonsense, there'd be some proof.'
    'If someone suddenly acquired abilities like that, they'd hide
them from everybody else,' I said, and took a look at Las through
the Twilight. 'A really different, Other kind of being would provoke
the envy and fear of people around him.'
    Las didn't betray the slightest sign of excitement. Just scepticism.
    'Well, surely this miracle worker would want to give the woman
he loves and his children the same kind of abilities? They'd gradually
take over from us as a biological species.'
    'But what if the special abilities couldn't be inherited?' I asked.
'Or they weren't necessarily inherited? And you couldn't transmit
them to anyone else either? Then you'd have the normal people
and these Others existing independently. And if there weren't
many of the Others, then they'd hide their abilities from everybody
else . . .'
    'Seems to me like you're talking about a random mutation that
produces extrasensory abilities,' Las said, thinking out loud. 'Only
if that mutation is random and recessive, it's absolutely no use to
us. But you can actually have titanium bones installed right now!'
    'Not a good idea,' I muttered.
    We both had a drink.
    'You know, this is a pretty weird situation we're in here,' Las
mused. 'A huge empty building, hundreds of apartments – and
only nine people living in them . . . that's if we include you. The
things you could get up to. It takes your breath away. And what
a video you could shoot! Just imagine it – the luxurious interiors,
empty restaurants, dead laundries, rusting exercise machines and
cold saunas, empty swimming pools and casino tables wrapped in
plastic sheeting. And a young girl wandering through it all.
Wandering around and singing. It doesn't even matter what.'
    'Do you shoot videos?' I asked cautiously.
    'Nah . . .' Las frowned. 'Well . . . just the once I helped this
punk band I know shoot one. They showed it on MTV, but then
it was banned.'
    'What was so terrible about it?'
    'Nothing really,' said Las. 'It was just a song, nothing offensive
about it, in fact it was about love. The visuals were unusual. We
shot them in a hospital for patients with motor function disorders.
We set up strobe lights in a hall, put on the song "Captain,
captain, why have you left the horse?" and invited the patients to
dance. So they danced to the strobes. Or they tried to. And then
we laid the new sound sequence over the visuals. The result was
really stylish. But you really can't show it. It has a bad feel somehow.'
    I imagined the visuals and squirmed.
    'I'm no good as a video producer,' Las admitted. 'Or as a musician
. . . they played a song of mine on the radio once, in the
middle of the night, in a programme