"Theodore Sturgeon - Slow Sculpture" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

"Well then, why?"
He gazed at her for what to her seemed a very long
time indeed.
"You really want to know, don't you?"



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She nodded.
He waved a sudden hand, up and out.
"Where do you suppose all this came from--the house,
the land, the equipment?"
She waited.
"An exhaust system," he said, with a thickening of his
voice she was coming to know. "A way of guiding exhaust
gases out of internal combustion engines in such a way
that they are given a spin. Unburned solids are embedded
in the walls of the muffler in a glass wool liner that slips
out in one piece and can be replaced by a clean one
every couple of thousand miles. The rest of the exhaust is
fired by its own spark plug and what will bum, burns.
The heat is used to preheat the fuel. The rest is spun again
through a five-thousand-mile cartridge. What finally gets
out is, by today's standards at least, pretty clean. And
because of the preheating it actually gets better mileage
out of the engine."
"So you've made a lot of money."
"I made a lot of money," he echoed. "But not because
the thing is being used to cut down air pollution. I got
the money because an automobile company bought it
and buried it in a vault. They don't like it because it costs
something to install in new cars. Some .friends of theirs in
the refining business don't like it because it gets high
performance out of crude fuels. Well, all right1 didn't
know any better and I won't make the same mistake
again. But yes I'm angry. I was angry when I was a kid
on a tank ship and we were set to washing down a bulk-
head with chipped brown soap and canvas. I went ashore
and bought a detergent and tried it and it was better,
faster and cheaper, so I took it to the bos'n, who gave me
a punch in the mouth for pretending to know his job
better than he did. Well, he was drunk at the time but
the rough part came when the old shellbacks in the crew
gauged up on me for being what they called a 'company
man that's a dirty name in a ship. I just couldn't un-
derstand why people got in the way of something better.
"I've been up against that all my life. I have something
in my head that just won't quit. It's a way I have of ask-