"Pohl, Frederik - Growing Up In Edge City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

Growing Up In Edge CityGROWING UP IN EDGE CITY

by Fredrik Pohl
Version 1.0



Among the closest friends I had in the thirty years I lived in Red Bank, New
Jersey, was a family named Waterman. Bob and Dorothy and their offspring, who
were much of an age with my own. It was a great loss when they moved nearly a
hundred miles away, to the antique New Jersey resort city of Cape May, which is
about as far south as you can get in The state without swimming. So, when I
could, I drove down to visit them with as much of my family as could be
collected for the purpose. All the way down the Garden State Parkway, on one
visit, a story was nibbling at my mind-not just a set of characters and
situations but a particular way of telling the story that I had just invented
and wanted to try out. After we'd all caught up on old times over lunch, and the
kids had none off to the boats or the shopping centers or the boardwalk and
beach, I mentioned to Dorothy Waterman that I had just realized the right place
to set the story was right in Cape May. "Well, she said, "I've got a typewriter
I'm not using- And so, sitting on the Watermans' porch, between lunch and our
dinner date at one of the best seafood restaurants in the world, this came out.
In the evenings after school Chandlie played private games. He was permitted to
do so. His overall index of gregariousness was high enough to allow him to
choose his own companions, or no companion at all but a Pal, when he wanted it
that way. On Tueday and Fourthday he generally spent his time with a
seven-year-old female named Marda, quick and bright, with a chiseled, demure
little face that would have beseemed pretty woman of twenty, apt at mathematical
intuitions and the stringing of beads. The proctors logged in their private
games under the heading of "sensuality sensitivity training, but they called
them "You Show Me Yours and I'll Show You Mine. The proctors, in their abstract
and deterministic way, approved of what Chandlie did. Even then he was marked
for special challenge, having been evaluated as Councilman potential. and when
on most other evenings Chandlie went down to the machine rooms and checked out a
Pal, no objections were raised, no questions were asked, and no follow-up
warnings were flagged in the magnetic cores of his record-fiche. He went off
freely and openly, wherever he chose. This was so even though there was a
repeating anomaly in his log. Almost every evening for an hour or two,
Chandlie's personal transponder stopped broadcasting his location fix. They
could not tell where he was in Edge City. They accepted this because of their
own limitations. It was recorded in the proctors basic memory file that there
were certain areas of the City in which old electromagnetic effects interfered
with the radio direction finding signals. They were not strategically important
areas. The records showed nothing dangerous or forbidden there. The proctors
noted the gap in the log but attached no importance to it. As a matter of
routine they opened up the Pal's chrome-steel tamper-proof course-plot tapes
from time to time, but it was only spot-checking. They did the same for
everyone's Pal. They never found anything significantly wrong in Chandue's. If
they had been less limited, they might have inquired further. A truly good
program would have cross- referenced Chandlie's personality profile, learned