"Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

could easily lose it along with his life. I alone possessed these facts, I realized, thanks to the
books that Dr. R.G. loaned to me briefly and which I returned just before his premature death. As
far as I know, he burned them, thus taking the secret with him to the grave.
 Silence seemed the simplest solution: if I kept quiet, I would save my skin. But what a
shame, to sit on a thousand and one extraordinary things having to do with the political history of
the next century, things opening up completely new horizons in all areas of human life. Take, for
example, the astonishing reversal -- completely unforeseen -- in the field of artificial intelligence
(AI), which became a force to be reckoned with precisely because it did not become the machine
embodiment of the human mind. If I remained silent for my own safety, I would be depriving
myself of all the advantages stemming from that knowledge.
Another idea occurred to me: to write down exactly what I remembered of those volumes
and place the manuscript in a bank vault. It would be necessary to write down everything I
retained from my reading, because with the passage of time I would forget many particulars of
such a broad subject. Then, if I wanted to refresh my memory, I could visit the vault, take notes
there, and return the manuscript to the strongbox. But it was dangerous. Someone could spy on
me. Besides, in today's world no bank vault was 100-percent secure. Even a thief of low
intelligence would figure out, sooner or later, what an extraordinary document had fallen into his
hands. And even if he discarded and destroyed my manuscript, I would not know it and would
live in constant dread that the connection between my person and the history of the twenty-first
century would come to light.
My dilemma was how to hide the secret forever but at the same time take advantage of it
freely -- to hide it from the world but not from myself. After much deliberation, I realized that
this could be done very easily. The safest way to conceal a remarkable idea -- every word of it
true -- was to publish it as science fiction. Just as a diamond thrown on a heap of broken glass
would become invisible, so an authentic revelation placed amid the stupidities of science fiction
would take on their coloration -- and cease to be dangerous.
At first, however, still fearful, I made a very modest use of the secret I possessed. In 1967
I wrote a science-fiction novel entitled His Master's Voice (published in English in 1983 by
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). On page 125 of that edition, third line from the top, are the words
"the ruling doctrine was. . . 'indirect economic attrition,' " and then the doctrine is expressed by
the aphorism "The thin starve before the fat lose weight."
The doctrine expressed publicly in the United States in 1980 -- thirteen years after the
original edition of His Master's Voice -- was put a little differently. (In the West German press
they used the slogan "den Gegner totr├╝sten " -- "arm the enemy to death.")
Once I had confirmed -- and there had been time enough to do so, after all, since the
book's appearance -- that no one had noticed how my "fantasizing" agreed with later political
developments, I grew bolder. I understood that truth, when set in fiction, is camouflaged
perfectly, and that even this fact can be safely confessed. For that matter, no one takes anything
seriously if it's published. So the best way to keep a top secret secret is to put it out in a mass
edition.
Having ensured the safety of my secret thus, I can now serenely set about giving a
complete report. I will confine myself to the first two volumes of Weapons Systems of the
Twenty-first Century: The Upside-down Evolution, published in 2105. I could even name the
authors (none of whom has been born yet), but what would be the point? The work is in three
volumes. The first presents the development of weapons from the year 1944; the second explains
how the nuclear-arms race gave rise to the "unhumanizing" of warfare by transferring the
production of weapons from the defense industry to the battlefield itself; and the third deals with
the effect this greatest military revolution had on the subsequent history of the world.
 II