"Blish, James - And All The Stars A Stage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

secondly, the morning television newscast, with its usual quota of stories
which seemed to differ from day to day but actually were always the same:
the swearing-in of the first World Legislature to be composed entirely of
women delegates; the failure (again) to meet the year's food production
quota, despite the most intensive, back-


7
 8 lames Blish
breaking exploitations of hydroponics, undersea farming, cloud culture,
desert irrigation, deep-tank mass cell culture and half a dozen other
techniques the names of which conveyed absolutely nothing to Jorn; the
successful landing of a robot-probe expedition on the tiny, sunbaked, and
intransigently useless planet nearest the Sun, whose name fled out of Jorn's
head as slipperily as it had skidded in on the oil of the newscaster's
voice, the verdict in a sensation trial involving a minor government
functionary who had brought a paternity suit against someone in her official
familias -sensational only in that the usually conclusive blood tests having
failed for some complicated genetic reason, she seemed to want to establish
paternity, rather than to disavow it and thus take the child into her own
cr6che (and two seconds after he had heard the verdict, Jorn could not
remember whether she had won or lost, and could think of no reason why he
should care).
And given, finally, the spectacle of an unusually intelligent young man,
still almost fully in possession of the standard engineer's education of
his time, desperately sitting through this barrage of unchangingly
insignificant news stories, as daily and as interchangeable as a dish of
catmeat, in the sole hope of hearing something which might lead him to a
job. Of course a television newscast is a wholly inappropriate medium in
which to run a Help Wanted column, since the listener cannot decide whether
or not he is interested in a given bid until he has heard it all, by which
time it is too late for him to write down the address and the telephone
number and such other details as he may need to study or to carry out onto
the beItways with him. Employers who were really seriously in search of
skilled help invariably still resorted to the newspapers, and in the very
rare cases where they also
 And all the Stars a Stage 9

Inserted a television appeal, they took it for granted that anyone in whom
they were likely to be interested would be making a telefax transcript of
the entire jobopenings announcement. This was nonsensical, since nobody but
an unmarried male would be desperate enough to hope to locate a job through
these television announcements in the first place, and the sets in the
residence conclave rooms did not include telefax equipment; it was of course
true that the set in the recreation hall had a telefax: attachment, but no
bachelor in his right mind could hope to compete with two hundred others for
that single sheet of blurrily printed brown paper, which even when new
looked as though it had been rescued almost too late from a fire, and still
have any time left over for tracking down the very few jobs it announced. If
you had hoped to have a hearing at all, you had to hop, the moment you got