"Raymond F. Nelson - Then Beggar's Could Ride" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nelson Raymond F)

He shook his head, smiling wistfully. "Not yet."

"When?"
 "In a year, two years. As long as it takes."

"That could be a long time. You could get as tired of me asтАж as I am of
myself."

He rocked back in his chair and gazed up at the glowing ceiling. "Don't
worry about that. There's something I think you ought to understand from
the outset. We're not giving you all this free treatment out of charity, so
you needn't feel guilty about it. We don't feel sorry for you. We feelтАж
threatened by you."

I was astonished. "Why would anyone feel threatened by me?"

"The planet Earth has reached a certain kind of perfection, Jack.
There's no war, no poverty, no starvation, almost no crime. The problems
that terrified our grandfathersтАФair and water pollution, overpopulation,
the energy shortage, racial and religious hatred, sexual inequalityтАФthey're
all licked. People live a long time, and they're not sick very much. We have
a Utopia here, or as close as man has ever come to a Utopia. So you can
see that when you're so unhappy you'd rather have no life at all than a life
among us, it causes, if not a threat to us, at least acute embarrassment."
He looked at me expectantly, hopefully, almost pleadingly.

"You know," I said after a pause, "I never really thought about that."

I thought about it on the way home, as I pedaled my bicycle along the
elevated bikeway, filling my lungs with clean, fresh, flower-scented air. I
looked toward the San Francisco Bay, where the sun was setting behind
the triple-decked Golden Gate Bridge; saw all the vertical windmills rising
from rooftops and backyards and rotating slowly in the breeze like huge
barrels with two broad slits in their sides; saw the seven and eight story
business buildings, one wall covered with a vast curving parabolic
reflector that focused a powerful stream of sunlight into a facing "target
building"; saw the other bowl-shaped solar collectors dotting the skyline;
saw the homes all built at a certain angle to the sun and painted in a
certain combination of black and white paint that regulated winter and
summer temperatures without the use of heaters or air conditioners; saw
the small farm-parks that separated the blocks of homes and business
structures at regular intervals; saw the almost noiseless electric trucks
entering and leaving the auto level of the freeway beneath me; saw the
duroplastic rain canopy above me.
 It was all perfect, except for me.

***

"It's a good mim," I told her.