"C M Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl - Wolfbane UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

They were wandering and mooning about, as always-maybe today more than most days, since they hoped it would be the day the Sun blossomed flame once more.
Tropile always thought of the wandering, mooning Citizens as they. There was a "we" somewhere for Tropile, no doubt, but Tropile had not as yet located it, not even in the bonds of the marriage contract. He was in no hurry. At the age of fourteen Glenn Tropile had reluctantly come to realize certain things about himself; that he disliked being bested; that he had to have a certain advantage in all his dealings, or an intolerable itch of the mind drove him to discomfort. The things added up to a terrifying fear, gradually becoming knowl-
edge, that the only "we" that could properly include him was one that it was not very wise to join.
He had realized, in fact, that he was a Wolf.
For some years Tropile had struggled against it-for Wolf was a bad word, the children he played with were punished severely for saying it, and for almost nothing else. It was not proper for one Citizen to advantage himself at the expense of another; Wolves did that. It was proper for a Citizen to accept what he had, not to strive for more; to find beauty in small things; to accommodate himself, with the minimum of strain and awkwardness, to whatever his life happened to be. Wolves were not like that; Wolves never Meditated, Wolves never Appreciated, Wolves never were Translated. That supreme fulfillment, granted only to those who succeeded in a perfect meditation on connectivity-that surrender of the world and the flesh by taking leave of both- that could never be achieved by a Wolf.
Accordingly, Glenn Tropile had tried very hard to do all the things that Wolves could not do.
He had nearly succeeded; his specialty, Water Watching, had been most rewarding; he had achieved many partly successful meditations on connectivity.
And yet he was still a Wolf; for he still felt that burning, itching urge to triumph and to hold an advantage. For that reason, it was almost impossible for him to make friends
among the Citizens and gradually he had almost stopped trying.
Tropile had arrived in Wheeling nearly a year before, making him one of the early settlers in point of time. And yet there was not a Citizen in the street who was prepared to exchange recognition gestures with him.
He knew them, nearly every one. He knew their names and their wives' names; he knew what northern states they had moved down from with the spreading of the ice, as the sun grew dim; he knew very nearly to the quarter of a gram what stores of sugar and salt and coffee each one of them had put away-for their guests, of course, not for themselves; the well-bred Citizen hoarded only for the entertainment of others. He knew these things because there was an advantage to Tropile in knowing them. But there was no advantage in having anyone know him.
A few did-that banker, Germyn; for Tropile had approached him only a few months before about a prospective loan. But it had been a chancy, nervous encounter; the idea was so luminously simple to Tropile-organize an expedition to the coal mines that once had flourished nearby; find the coal, bring it to Wheeling, heat the houses. And yet it had sounded blasphemous to Germyn. Tropile had counted himself lucky merely to have been refused the loan, instead of being cried out upon as Wolf.
The oatmeal vendor was fussing worriedly around his neat stack of paper twists in the salt bowl.
Tropile avoided the man's eyes. Tropile was not interested in the little wry smile of self-deprecation which the vendor would make to him, given half a chance; Tropile knew well enough what was disturbing the vendor. Let it disturb him. It was Tropile's custom to take extra twists of salt; they were in his pockets now; they would stay there. Let the vendor wonder why he was short.
Tropile licked the bowl of his spoon and stepped into the street. He was comfortably aware under a double-thick parka that the wind was blowing very cold.
A Citizen passed him, walking alone: odd, thought Tropile. He was walking rapidly, and there was a look of taut despair on his face. Still more odd. Odd enough to be worth another look, because that sort of haste, that sort of abstraction, suggested something to Tropile. They were in no way normal to the gentle sheep of the class They, except in one particular circumstance.
Glenn Tropile crossed the street to follow the abstracted Citizen, whose name, he knew, was Boyne. The man blundered into Citizen Germyn outside the baker's stall, and Tropile stood back out of easy sight, watching and listening.
Boyne was on the ragged edge of breakdown. What Tropile heard and saw confirmed his diagnosis. The one particular circumstance
was close to happening; Citizen Boyne was on the verge of a total lack of control. The circumstances had a name, borrowed from the language of a now uninhabited Pacific island where simple farmers, pushed too far, would turn rogue, slashing and killing with their cane-cutting knives.
It was called "running amok."
Tropile looked at the man with amusement and contempt. Amok! The gentle sheep could be pushed too far, after all! He had seen it before; the signs were obvious.
There was sure to be an advantage in it for Glenn Tropile; there was an advantage in anything, if you looked for it. He watched and waited. He picked his spot with care, so that he could see Citizen Boyne inside the baker's stall, making a dismal botch of slashing his quarter-kilo of bread from the Morning Loaf.
He waited for Boyne to come racing out. . .
Boyne did.
A yell-loud, piercing: It was Citizen Germyn, shrilling: "Amok, amok!" A scream. An enraged wordless cry from Boyne, and the baker's knife glinting in the faint light as Boyne swung it. And then Citizens were scattering in every direction-all of the Citizens but one.
One citizen was under the knife-his own knife, as it happened; it was the baker himself. Boyne chopped and chopped again. And then Boyne came out, like a roaring flame, the bread knife whistling about his head. The gentle Citizens fled panicked before him. He struck
at their retreating forms, and screamed and struck again. Amok!
It was the one particular circumstance when they forgot to be gracious-one of the two, Tropile corrected himself as he strolled across to the baker's stall. His brow furrowed; because there was another circumstance when they lacked grace, and one which affected him more nearly.
He watched the maddened creature, Boyne, already far down the road, chasing a knot of Citizens around a corner. Tropile sighed and stepped into the baker's stall to see what he might gain from this. Boyne would wear himself out; the surging rage would leave him as quickly as it came; he would be a sheep again, and the other sheep would close in and capture him. That was what happened when a Citizen ran amok. It was a measure of what pressures were on the Citizens that at any moment there might be one gram of pressure too much, and one of them would crack. It happened all the time. It had happened here in Wheeling twice within the past two months; Glenn Tropile had seen it happen in Pittsburgh, Altoona and Bronxville.
There is a limit to pressure.
Tropile walked into the baker's stall and looked down without emotion at the slaughtered baker; Tropile had seen corpses before.
He looked around the stall, calculating. As a starter, he bent to pick up the quarter-kilo of bread Boyne had dropped, dusted it off and slipped it into his pocket. Food was always
useful. Given enough food, perhaps Boyne would not have run amok. Was it simple hunger they cracked under? Or the knowledge of the thing on Mount Everest, or the hovering Eyes, or the sought-after-dreaded prospect of Translation, or merely the strain of keeping up their laboriously figured lives? Did it matter? They cracked and ran amok, and Tropile never would, and that was what mattered.
He leaned across the counter, reaching for what was left of the Morning Loaf-
And found himself staring into the terrified large eyes of Citizeness Germyn.
She screamed: "Wolf! Citizens, help me! Here is a Wolf!"
Tropile faltered. He hadn't even seen the damned woman, but there she was, rising up from behind the counter, screaming her head off: "Wolf, Wolf!"
He said sharply: "Citizeness, I beg you-" But that was no good. The evidence was on him, and her screams would fetch others. Tropile panicked. He started toward her to silence her; but that was no good, either. He whirled. She was screaming, screaming, and there were people to hear. Tropile darted into the street, but they were popping out of every doorway now, they were appearing from each rat's hole in which they had hid to escape Boyne. "Please!" he cried, angry and frightened. "Wait a minute!" But they weren't waiting. They had heard the woman, and maybe some of them had seen him with the bread. They were all around him-no, they were all
over him; they were clutching at him, tearing at his soft, warm furs. They pulled at his pockets, and the stolen twists of salt spilled accusingly out. They ripped at his sleeves, and even the stout, unweakened seams ripped open. He was fairly captured.
"Wolf!" they were shouting. "Wolf!" It drowned out the distant noise from where Boyne had finally been run to earth, a block and more away. It drowned out everything.
It was the other circumstance when they forgot to be gracious: When they had trapped a Son of the Wolf.
______3______
Engineering had long ago come to an end.
Engineering is possible under one condition of the equation:
Total Available Calories _ Artistic-Techno-
Population. logical Style When the ratio Calories-to-Population is large- say five thousand or more, five thousand daily calories for every living man-then the Artistic-Technological Style is big. People carve Mount Rushmore; they build great foundries; they manufacture an enormous automobile to carry one housewife half a mile for the purchase of one lipstick. Life is coarse and rich where C:P is large. At the other extreme, where C:P is too small, life does not exist at all. It has been starved out.
Experimentally, add little increments to C:P and it will be some time before the right-hand side of the equation becomes significant. But at last, in the 1,000-1,500 calorie range, Artistic-
Technological Style firmly appears in self-perpetuating form. C:P in that range produces the small arts, the appreciations, the peaceful arrangements of necessities into subtle relationships of traditionally-agreed-upon virtue. Japan, locked into its Shogunate prison, picked scanty food from mountainsides and beauty out of arrangements of lichens and paper. The small, inexpensive sub-sub-arts are characteristic of the 1,000-1,500 calorie range.
And this was the range of Earth; the world of a hundred million men, after the planet was stolen by its new binary.
Some few persons inexpensively pursued the study of science with pencil and renewable paper, but the last research accelerator had long since been shut down; the juice from its hydropower dam was needed to supply meager light to a million homes and to cook the pablum for two million brand-new babies. In those days, one dedicated Byzantine wrote the definitive encyclopedia of engineering (though he was no engineer). Its four hundred and twenty tiny volumes exhausted the Gizeh pyramid and its unknown contractor, the Wall of Shih-Hwang Ti, the Gothic builders, Brunei who changed the face of England, the Roeblings of Brooklyn, Groves of the Pentagon, Duggan of the Anti-Ballistic-Missile System (before C:P dropped to the point where war became vanishingly implausible), Levern of Operation Up. But this encyclopedist could not use a slide rule without thinking, faltering, jotting down his decimals.