"William Tenn - Generation of Noah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

yelled, so loudly that they all whirled to face him, "but I won't punish you, not only for now, but forever!
And as I with you," he screamed, "so you with yours! Understand?"
"Yes," they replied in a weeping, ragged chorus. "We understand!"
"Swear! Swear that you and your children and your children's children will never punish another
human beingтАФno matter what the provocation."
"We swear!" they bawled at him. "We swear!"
Then they all sat down.
To wait.


Afterword


For a long time (until I wrote "The Custodian"), "Generation of Noah" was my favor-ite among my
stories. But the science-fiction magazines didn't want it: too hortatory. The general fiction magazines all
said something on the order of "too fantastic." Six years after publication, it was rejected by a movie
producer who was interested in filming some of my work ("far too prosaic for today's audiences").
Fred Pohl, the agent who finally sold the piece, liked it almost as much as I did. But he begged me
and begged me to change what he called "the Greek chorus ending." And I kept telling him that the
goddam Greek chorus ending was why I had written the story in the first place. He would walk away
from me muttering, "That's no excuse at all."
So from the white-bearded standpoint of eighty years of age, let me remind the reader:
In 1947 when I wrote "Generation of Noah," the Federation of Atomic Scientists kept trying to tell
everyone how much they apologized for having helped to develop our nuclear weaponry. And a lot of
them got investigated as un-American for making such noises. (After all, the military kept saying, the
atomic bomb was a weapon just like any other weapon. A bigger bang for the buck, some general
shrugged.)
By 1957, six years after the story was published, we knew full well that the Soviet Union not only
had nuclear weapons too, but might even have better means of delivering them than we. Everyone had
heard of the atomic bomb drills in the schools where the children learned that at a given signal they were
to jump off their benches and lie down under their desks with their hands locked behind their heads to
protect vital parts. I knew peopleтАФI swear this!тАФwho said that in the event of an atomic attack one
should above all close the windows and pull down the window shades. That would reduce the amount of
radiation reaching you.
And, of course, this was the tail-end of the period where every new home built had a bomb shelter
in the basement, a tiny room surrounded by well-plastered walls and maybe, if the contractor was an
especially responsible type, by some walls of brick. You go now into homes built in this period and you
find that those bomb shelters are being used as fruit cellars or wine vaults or, most likely, extra storage
space.
Well, the bipolar Cold War has given way to the sunshine of monopolar power, and all that is
behind us now.
Like hell.
John Campbell wrote a number of editorials in Astounding Science Fiction of the 1940s that were
remarkably strong and good and gave him a free pass to be forgotten as the chief publicist of Dianetics
and the Hieronymus Machine. I remember one where he talked of the atomic bomb as The Great
Equalizer.
He pointed out that when the Colt six-gun reached the West, it had a tremendous effect on the
relationships between small, weak men and the big, strong men who formerly had been able to bully them
at will. Billy the Kid and others now had their equalizer. And from Los Alamos on, Campbell said, small
countries that were unable to afford big navies and big artilleries and big air forces now could have