"Murray Leinster - A Logic Named Joe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

Laurine was to start askin' questions with a technical aspect to them, that would be logics' service meat!
And fella, I was scared! If you think a he-man oughtn't to be scared of just one blondeтАФyou ain't met
Laurine!
I'm drivin' blind when a social-conscious guy asks how to bring about his own particular system of
social organization at once. He don't ask if it's best or if it'll work. He just wants to get it started. And the
logicтАФor JoeтАФtells him! Simultaneous, there's a retired preacher asks how can the human race be cured
of concupiscence. Bein' seventy, he's pretty safe himself, but he wants to remove the peril to the spiritual
welfare of the rest of us. He finds out. It involves constructin' a sort of broadcastin' station to emit a
certain wave-pattern an' turnin' it on. Just that. Nothing more. It's found out afterward, when he is
solicitin' funds to construct it. Fortunate, he didn't think to ask logics how to finance it, or it woulda told
him that, too, an' we woulda all been cured of the impulses we maybe regret afterward but never at the
time. And there's another group of serious thinkers who are sure the human race would be a lot better off
if everybody went back to nature an' lived in the woods with the ants an' poison ivy. They start askin'
questions about how to cause humanity to abandon cities and artificial conditions of living. They
practically got the answer in logics service!
Maybe it didn't strike you serious at the time, but while I was drivin' aimless, sweatin' blood over
Laurine bein' after me, the fate of civilization hung in the balance. I ain't kiddin'. For instance, the Superior
Man gang that sneers at the rest of us was quietly asking questions on what kinda weapons could be
made by which Superior Men could take over and run things . . .
But I drove here an' there, sweatin' an' talkin' to myself.
"What I oughta do is ask this wacky logics service how to get outa this mess," I says. "But it'd just tell
me a intricate and' foolproof way to bump Laurine off. I wanna have peace! I wanna grow comfortably
old and brag to other old guys about what a hellion I used to be, without havin' to go through it an' lose
my chance of livin' to be a elderly liar."
I turn a corner at random, there in the Maintenance car.
"It was a nice kinda world once," I says, bitter. "I could go home peaceful and not have belly-cramps
wonderin' if a blonde has called up my wife to announce my engagement to her. I could punch keys on a
logic without gazing into somebody's bedroom while she is giving her epidermis a air bath and being led
to think things I gotta take out in thinkin'. I couldтАФ"
Then I groan, rememberin' that my wife, naturally, is gonna blame me for the fact that our private life
ain't private any more if anybody has tried to peek into it.
"It was a swell world," I says, homesick for the dear dead days-before-yesterday. "We was playin'
happy with our toys like little innocent children until somethin' happened. Like a guy named Joe come in
and squashed all our mud pies."
Then it hit me. I got the whole thing in one flash. There ain't nothing in the tank set-up to start relays
closin'. Relays are closed exclusive by logics, to get the information the keys are punched for. Nothin' but
a logic coulda cooked up the relay patterns that constituted logics service. Humans wouldn't ha' been
able to figure it out! Only a logic could integrate all the stuff that woulda made all the other logics work
like this . . .
There was one answer. I drove into a restaurant and went over to a pay-logic an' dropped in a coin.
"Can a logic be modified," I spell out, "to cooperate in long-term planning which human brains are
too limited in scope to do?"
The screen sputters. Then it says:
"Definitely yes."
 "How great will the modifications be?" I punch.
"Microscopically slight. Changes in dimensions," says the screen. "Even modern precision gauges are
not exact enough to check them, however. They can only come about under present manufacturing
methods by an extremely improbable accident, which has only happened once."
"How can one get hold of that one accident which can do this highly necessary work?" I punch.
The screen sputters. Sweat broke out on me. I ain't got it figured out close, yet, but what I'm scared