"Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Ideal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

cursed with the unenviable quality of being late to anything and for everything. He even asserts that the
occasional designs I submit are late Jacobean, but that isn't fair. They're Post-Romanesque.

Old N. J. also objects to my penchant for ladies of the stage and 'vision screen, and periodically
threatens to cut my allowance, though that's supposed to be a salary. It's inconvenient to be so
dependent, and sometimes I regret that unfortunate market crash of 2009 that wiped out my own money,
although it did keep me from marrying Whimsy White, and van Manderpootz, through his subjunctivisor,
succeeded in proving that that would have been a catastrophe. But it turned out nearly as much of a
disaster anyway, as far as my feelings were concerned. It took me months to forget Joanna Caldwell and
her silvery eyes. Just another instance when I was a little late.

Van Manderpootz himself is my old Physics Professor, head of the Department of Newer Physics at N.
Y. U., and a genius, but a bit eccentric. Judge for yourself.

"And that's the thesis," he said suddenly, interrupting my thoughts.

"Eh? Oh, of course. But what's that grinning robot got to do with it?"

He purpled. "I've just told you!" he roared. "Idiot! Imbecile! To dream while van Manderpootz talks! Get
out! Get out!"

I got. It was late anyway, so late that I overslept more than usual in the morning, and suffered more than
the usual lecture on promptness from my father at the office.


Van Manderpootz had forgotten his anger by the next time I dropped in for an evening. The robot still
stood in the corner near the window, and I lost no time asking its purpose.

"It's just a toy I had some of the students construct," he explained. "There's a screen of photoelectric cells
behind the right eye, so connected that when a certain pattern is thrown on them, it activates the
mechanism. The thing's plugged into the light-circuit, but it really ought to run on gasoline."

"Why?"

"Well, the pattern it's set for is the shape of an automobile. See here." He picked up a card from his
desk, and cut in the outlines of a streamlined car like those of that year. "Since only one eye is used," he
continued, "the thing can't tell the difference between a full-sized vehicle at a distance and this small
outline nearby. It has no sense of perspective."

He held the bit of cardboard before the eye of the mechanism. Instantly came its roar of "A-a-gh-rasp!"
and it leaped forward a single pace, arms upraised. Van Manderpootz withdrew the card, and again the
thing relapsed stolidly into its place.

"What the devil!" I exclaimed. "What's it for?"

"Does van Manderpootz ever do work without reason back of it? I use it as a demonstration in my
seminar."

"To demonstrate what?"