"Pohl, Frederik - Rem The Rememberer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

His father tried to answer them as well as he could. "Well, son, he said,
"people like having their own cars. You'll see, when you grow up and get your
own license. When you get behind the wheel, you're on your own. You can shut out
all the unpleasant things-
"What things, Dad?
Burt looked suddenly remorseful. "Oh, not things like here, Rem! You and your
mother-well, I wouldn't change places with anybody in the world. But there are a
lot of problems. Burt was a tax accountant for the New York State government. He
shook his head. "We need so much, he said, "and it's hard to know where the
money's going to come from. Let's see, what was the other question? Oh, about
waste heat and sewage. Well, that's one of the problems, Rem. There's so much
pollution, and it costs too much to get rid of it. I suppose that, of course,
you could theoretically use the heat from the factories and power plants and so
on to heat homes or even to warm up some sort of farms-they'd have to be
greenhouses, actually-so you could grow more things. But the capital cost, Rem,
would be immense. He hesitated, trying to find the words to explain economics to
a ten-year-old. "We just don't have the money. Maybe if we'd started a long time
ago- But we didn't. You can't drive cars without freeways to drive them on, do
you see? I guess the government could have built piping systems and
recirculation plants, but then where would the money have come from for the
highways? We did the best we could. I think. We used up all the low-sulfur fuels
first, and we kept on dumping sewage until it was too late to stop. And it got
harder and harder to make the fertilizer to grow the food. I suppose, he said
thoughtfully, "that if some people had made different decisions a century or so
ago, the world would be quite a different place. Some ways, it would be pretty
nice. But they didn't. And it's too late now. He smiled and squeezed Rem's
shoulder. "Speaking of being late, it's about time for you to be off to bed.
So Rem would take his pills and drink his glass of soymilk and go off to sleep.
He wasn't unhappy about that. He remembered the dream, and knew he would dream
it again, and that was something to look forward to. It was so very pleasant,
and so very real; he wasn't always sure which was the reality and which was the
dream.