"Stepping Stone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrison William)

Frederik Pohl is one of the collaboratin'est men even in this field in which multiple authorship is so commonFrederik
Pohl is one of the collaboration'est men even in this field in which multiple
authorship is so common. He is best known, of course, for his excellent novels
(both science fiction and "straight") with C. M. Kornbluth. He has worked with
Jack Williamson on a likable series of teen-age books; and he has further
collaborated, in an all but impenetrable haze of pseudonyms, with Isaac Asimov,
Frederic Arnold Kummer, Jr., Robert W. Lowndes, Dirk Wylie ..
This story is, I believe, his first with F&SF's Broadway critic William
Morrison. Fittingly it deals with collaborationЧif in quite a different sense:
the sense which the word acquired, in World War II, of helping the invader to
maintain his control over one's own people. This control is, fortunately for the
world, not so simple a matter as a galactic Viceroy may think. There is, Messrs.
Morrison and Pohl shrewdly point out, a certain inevitable flaw in any
collaborationist structure.

Stepping Stone
by WILLIAM MORRISON and FREDERIK POHL

ARTHUR CHESLEY WAS A CHEMIST, but you mustn't think of him as a scientist. He
was nothing of the kind.
He didn't inquire into the secrets of natureЧmaybe once he had, but then the
foundation grants ran out; and since his specialty couldn't be twisted to sound
as though it had anything to do with either nuclear energy or cancer cure it was
a matter of get a job or starve. So he got a job. He spent eight hours a night,
six nights a week, watching a stainless steel kettle with his fingers crossed.
"She's getting hot, Mr. Chesley!" one of the lab assistants would yell, and he'd
have to run over and tell them what to do. "Pressure's up, Mr. Chesley!" another
would cry, and he'd have to do something about thatЧor anyway, tell the
assistants what to do, because the union rules were pretty strong about who did
the actual work. It was all a matter of polymerization, which is cooking little
short molecules into big long molecules, and what came out of it all was rubber,
or maybe plastic wrappers, or the stuff that goes into children's toys,
depending on what was needed right thenЧand also on whether or not the kettle
exploded. Well, it was an easy job, except when the pressure suddenly climbed.
And it was night work, so Chesley had his days free. He kind of liked it, partly
because he got to boss the crew of assistants around. And they didn't mind. They
thought the whole thing was pretty funny, partly because they got two-forty an
hour against Chesley's dollar-seventy-five.
Chesley's wife didn't think that was funny at all. What she said was:
"Stepping stone! Arthur, you've been in a rut for seven years and I want to tell
you that I'm getting tired of stepping stones that don't step anywhere andЧ
Another thing, why can't you work days like anybody else instead of sleeping all
the time I'm trying to clean the house? Did you ever stop to think how much
trouble that makes for me? Can't you have any consideration for anybody else
andЧ And why can't you make your own lunch to take to the plant? Other men make
their own lunches. If you wouldn't sit around the house watching television
you'd have time to make your lunch, not to mention doing a few other littleЧ
That reminds me, what's keeping you from putting up the screens? The house will
be crawling, and I mean crawling, with every bug in the Bronx if you don't get
around to it. You hear me? Or is that too menial a job for a real chemistЧa real