"Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

and machinery, and it disciplined other countries by threatening to shoot big rockets at
them or to drop things on them from airplanes.
Most other countries didn't have doodley-squat. Many of them weren't even
inhabitable anymore. They had too many people and not enough space. They had sold
everything that was any good, and there wasn't anything to eat anymore, and still the
people went on fucking all the time.
Fucking was how babies were made.


A lot of the people on the wrecked planet were Communists. They had a theory that
what was left of the planet should be shared more or less equally among all the people,
who hadn't asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place. Meanwhile, more
babies were arriving all the timeтАФkicking and screaming, yelling for milk.
In some places people would actually try to eat mud or suck on gravel while babies
were being born just a few feet away.
And so on.

Dwayne Hoover's and Kilgore Trout's country, where there was still plenty of
everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn't think that Earthlings who had a lot
should share it with others unless they really wanted to, and most of them didn't want to.
So they didn't have to.


Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold onto it.
Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do.
Others couldn't get their hands on doodley-squat.
Dwayne Hoover was fabulously well-to-do when he met Kilgore Trout. A man
whispered those exact words to a friend one morning as Dwayne walked by: "Fabu-
lously well-to-do."
And here's how much of the planet Kilgore Trout owned in those days: doodley-
squat.
 And Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover met in Midland City, which was Dwayne's
home town, during an Arts Festival there in autumn of 1972.
As has already been said: Dwayne was a Pontiac dealer who was going insane.
Dwayne's incipient insanity was mainly a matter of chemicals, of course. Dwayne
Hoover's body was manufacturing certain chemicals which unbalanced his mind. But
Dwayne, like all novice lunatics, needed some bad ideas, too, so that his craziness
could have shape and direction.
Bad chemicals and bad ideas were the Yin and Yang of madness. Yin and Yang
were Chinese symbols of harmony. They looked like this:




The bad ideas were delivered to Dwayne by Kilgore Trout. Trout considered himself
not only harmless but invisible. The world had paid so little attention to him that he
supposed he was dead.
He hoped he was dead.
But he learned from his encounter with Dwayne that he was alive enough to give a
fellow human being ideas which would turn him into a monster.