"Frederik Pohl - The Midas Plague" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

"Get back to it. And straighten out this other thing. You
can do it. Fry. Consuming is everybody's duty. Just keep
that in mind."
Howland followed Morey out of the drafting room,
down to the spotless shops. "Bad time?" he inquired
solicitously. Moray grunted. It was none of Howland's
business.
Howland looked over his shoulder as he was setting up
the programing panel. Morey studied the matrices silently,
then got busy reading the summary tapes, checking them
back against the schematics, setting up the instructions on
the programing board. Howland kept quiet as Morey com-
pleted the setup and ran off a test tape. It checked per-
fectly; Morey stepped back to light a cigarette in celebra-
tion before pushing the start button.
Howland said, "Go on, run it. I can't go until you put
it in the works."
Morey grinned and pushed the button. The board
lighted up; within it, a tiny metronomic beep began to
pulse. That was all. At the other end of the quarter-mile
shed, Morey knew, the automatic sorters and conveyers
were fingering through the copper reels and steel ingots,
measuring hoppers of plastic powder and colors, setting
up an intricate weaving path for the thousands of in-
dividual components that would make up Bradmoor's new
K-50 Spin-a-Game. But from where they stood, in the
elaborately muraled programing room, nothing showed.
Bradmoor was an ultra-modernized plant; in the manu-
facturing end, even robots had been dispensed with in
favor of machines that guided themselves.
Morey glanced at his watch and logged in the starting
time while Howland quickly counter-checked Morey's
raw-material flow program.
"Checks out," Howland said solemnly, slapping him
on the back. "Calls for a celebration. Anyway, it's your
first design, isn't it?"
"Yes. First all by myself, at any rate."
Howland was already fishing in his private locker for
the bottle he kept against emergency needs. He poured
with a flourish. "To Morey Fry," he said, "our most fa-
vorite designer, in whom we are much pleased."
Morey drank. It went down easily enough. Morey had
conscientiously used his liquor rations for years, but he
had never gone beyond the minimum, so that although
liquor was no new experience to him, the single drink
immediately warmed him. It warmed his mouth, his
throat, the hollows of his chest; and it settled down with
a warm glow inside him. Howland, exerting himself to be
nice, complimented Morey fatuously on the design and
poured another drink. Morey didn't utter any protest at