"Harrison, Harry - Make Room! Make Room! (Soylent Green) 3.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

Paul R. Ehrlich

PROLOGUE
In December, 1959, The President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower,
said: "This government... will not... as long as I am here, have a positive
political doctrine in its program that has to do with this problem of birth
control. That is not our business." It has not been the business of any American
government since that time.
In 1950 the United StatesЧwith just 9.5 per cent of the world's populationЧwas
consuming 50 per cent of the world's raw materials. This percentage keeps
getting bigger and within fifteen years, at the present rate of growth, the
United States will be consuming over 83 per cent of the annual output of the
earth's materials. By the end of the century, should our population continue to
increase at the same rate, this country will need more than 100 per cent of the
planet's resources to maintain our current living standards. This is a
mathematical impossibilityЧaside from the fact that there will be about seven
billion people on this earth at that time andЧperhapsЧthey would like to have
some of the raw materials too.
In which case, what will the world be like?

MONDAY, AUGUST 9, 1999
NEW YORK CITYЧstolen from the trusting Indians by the wily Dutch, taken from the
law-abiding Dutch by the warlike British, then wrested in turn from the peaceful
British by the revolutionary colonials. Its trees were burned decades ago, its
hills leveled and the fresh ponds drained and filled, while the crystal springs
have been imprisoned underground and spill their pure waters directly into the
sewers. Reaching out urbanizing tentacles from its island home, the city has
become a megalopolis with four of its five boroughs blanketing half of one
island over a hundred miles long, engulfing another island, and sprawling up the
Hudson River onto the mainland of North America. The fifth and original borough
is Manhattan: a slab of primordial granite and metamorphic rock bounded on all
sides by water, squatting like a steel and stone spider in the midst of its web
of bridges, tunnels, tubes, cables and ferries. Unable to expand outward,
Manhattan has writhed upward, feeding on its own flesh as it tears down the old
buildings to replace them with the new, rising higher and still higherЧyet never
high enough, for there seems to be no limit to the people crowding here. They
press in from the outside and raise their families, and their children and their
children's children raise families, until this city is populated as no other
city has ever been in the history of the world.
On this hot day in August in the year 1999 there areЧgive or take a few
thousandЧthirty-five million people in the City of New York.

PART ONE
1
The August sun struck in through the open window and burned on Andrew Rusch's
bare legs until discomfort dragged him awake from the depths of heavy sleep.
Only slowly did he become aware of the heat and the damp and gritty sheet
beneath his body. He rubbed at his gummed-shut eyelids, then lay there, staring
up at the cracked and stained plaster of the ceiling, only half awake and
experiencing a feeling of dislocation, not knowing in those first waking moments