"Robert A. Heinlein - Beyond This Horizon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

not significant!"
Monroe-Alpha looked annoyed. "Don't be irreverent, " he advised. "And the
proper ratio is sixteen and a third to one; you should not have counted the
dog."
"Oh, forget it!" his friend answered. "How goes the tail chasing?" He wandered
around the room, picking things up and putting them down under Monroe-Alpha's
watchful eye, and finally stopped in front of the huge integrating
accumulator. "It's about time for your quarterly prediction, isn't it?"
"Not 'about time' -- it is time. I had just completed the first inclusive run
when you arrived. Want to see it?" He stepped to the machine, pressed a stud.
A photostat popped out. Monroe Alpha undipped it and handed it to Hamilton
without looking at it. He had no need to-the proper data had been fed into the
computer; he knew with quiet certainty that the correct answer would come out.
Tomorrow he would work the problem again, using a different procedure. If the
two answers did not then agree within the limits of error of the machine, he
would become interested in the figures themselves. But, of course, that would
not happen. The figures would interest his superiors; the procedure alone was
of interest to him.
Hamilton eyed the answer from a nonprofessional viewpoint. He appreciated, in
part at least, the huge mass of detail which had gone into this simple answer.
Up and down two continents human beings had gone about their lawful occasions-
buying, selling, making, consuming, saving, spending, giving receiving. A
group of men in Altoona, Pennsylvania, had issued unsecured aspirant stock to
subsidize further research into a new method of recovering iron from low grade
ores. The issue had been well received down in New Bolivar where there was a
superabundance of credit because of the extreme success of the tropical garden
cities along the Orinoco ("Buy a Slice of Paradise"). Perhaps that was the
canny Dutch influence in the mixed culture of that region. It might have been
the Latin influence which caused an unprecedented tourist travel away from the
Orinoco during the same period-to Lake Louise, and Patagonia, and Sitka.
No matter. All of the complex of transactions appeared in the answer in
Hamilton's hand. A child in Walla Walla broke its piggy bank (secretly, with
one eye on the door), gathered up the slowly accumulated slugs and bought a
perfectly delightful gadget, which not only did things, but made the
appropriate noises as well. Some place down in the innards of the auto-clerk
which handled the sale for the Gadget Shoppe four holes were punched in a
continuous roll of paper; the item appeared in the owner's cost accounting,
and was reflected in the accounting of the endless chain of middle
distributors, transporters, processors, original producers, service companies,
doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs-world without end.
The child (a bad-tempered little blond brat, bound to prove a disappointment
to his planners and developers) had a few slugs left over which he exchanged
for a diet-negative confection ("Father Christmas' Psuedo-Sweets-Not a tummy
ache in a tankful"); the sale was lumped with many others like it in the
accounts of the Seattle Vending Machine Corporation.
The broken piggy bank and its concatenations appeared in the figures in
Hamilton's hand, as a sliver of a fragment of a super-microscopic datum,
invisible even in the fifth decimal place. Monroe-Alpha had not heard of this
particular piggy bank when he set up the problem-nor would he, ever-but there
are tens of thousands of piggy banks, a large but countable number of