"C. L. Moore - Greater Than Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

tendency toward a non-mechanized rural civilization. It happened on the
telenews, so that half the world heard it.
"But Madam President," he said, "don't you realize where we're heading? The
world's going backward! It's no longer worth-while for our best minds to
attempt bettering living conditions. We're throwing genius away! Do you
realize that your cabinet yesterday flatly rejected the brilliant work of one
of our most promising young men?"
"I do!" Alice Wiliston's voice rang with sudden violence over half the world.
"That 'brilliant work,' as you call it, was a device that might have led to
war! Do you think we want that? Remember the promise that the first woman
president made the world, Dr. Phillips! So long as we sit in the White House
there will be no need for war!"
And Elizabeth of England nodded in London; Julianna VII smiled into her
Amsterdam telenews screen. While women ruled, war was outlawed. Peace and
ease, and plenty would dominate civilizatiou, leisure for cultivation of the
arts, humankind coming into its own at last, after so many ages of pain and
blood and heartbreak.
Years telescoped into centuries of peace and plenty in a garden world. Science
had turned its genius to the stabilization of the climate so that nowhere was
shelter necessary from cold or storms; food was freely abundant for all. The
Garden that Adam and Eve forfeited in the world's beginning had returned again
to their remotest descend
-ants, and the whole earth was Eden.
And in this world that no longer demanded the slightest physical effort,
mankind was turning to the cultivation of the mind. In these white, low-roofed
houses set among garden parks~, men and women in-
creasingly adventured into the realms beyond the flesh, exploring the
mysteries of the mind.
Bill Gory, leaning forward in his chair, had lost all identity with himself.
He was simply a consciousness watching time unfold before him. The gravestone
that bore his name on the California hillside had long since sunk into the
sod, but if there is immortality at all, Bill Cory watched himself move
forward through the centuries, down the long, expanding line of his
descendants. Now and again, startlingly, his own face looked briefly at him
from some faraway child of his remote grandchildren. His face, and Sallie's.
He saw pretty Sue come and go like reflections in a mirror. Not always Sue
unmistakably and completely-sometimes only her brown eyes lighted the face of
a many-times-great-granddaughter; sometimes the lift of her smile or the tilt
of her pretty nose alone was familiar to him in a strange face. But sometimes
Sue herself, perfect to the last detail, moved through the remote future. And
every time he saw those familiar features, his heart contracted with an ache
of tenderness for the daughter he yet might nevet have.
It was for these beloved Susatis that he was becoming uneasy as he watched
time go by in this lazy paradise world. People were slowing mentally and
physically. What need any more for haste or trouble? Why worry because certain
unimportant knowledge was being lost as time went on? The weather machines,
the food machines were eternal; what else really mattered? Let the birth rate
decline, let the dwindling race of the inventive and the ambitious fade like
the anachronism it was. The body had taken mankind as far as it could; the
mind was the vehicle for the future. In the vast reaches of infinity were