"Harlan Ellison - Pa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

I See a Man Sitting on a Chair, and the Chair Is Biting His Leg
Behind him lay the gray Azores, behind the Gates of Hercules; the sky above, the goo below.
“Screwin’ goo! Screwin’ goo!” Pareti yelled at the fading afternoon sunlight. It came up garbled, around the
stump of cigar, and it lacked the vigor Pareti usually brought to the curse, because it was nearly shift’s end, and he was
exhausted. The first time he had yelled it had been three years before, when he had signed up to work in the goo
fields as a harvester. He had yelled it when he’d first seen the mucous gray plankton mutation spotting this area of the
Atlantic. Like leprosy on the cool blue body of the sea.
“Screwin’ goo,” he murmured. It was ritual now. It kept him company in the punt. Just him, alone there: Joe
Pareti and his dying voice. And the ghostly gray-white goo.
He caught the moving flash of grayout of the corner of his eye, light reflecting in the Eskimo-slit glasses. He
wheeled the punt around expertly. The goo was extruding again. A grayish-pale tentacle rose above the ocean’s
surface; it looked like an elephant’s trunk. Skimming smoothly toward it, Pareti unconsciously gauged his distance:
five feet from it, right arm tensed, out comes the net--the strange net on its pole, that resembled nothing so much as
the butterfly nets used by the Indians of Patzcuaro--and with a side-arm softball pitch of a motion he scooped it up,
writhing.
The goo wriggled and twisted, flailed at the meshes, sucked toothlessly up the aluminum handle. Pareti
estimated the chunk at five pounds, even as he brought it inboard and dumped it into the lazarette. It was heavy for
so small a fragment.
As the goo fell toward it, the lazarette dilated and compressed air shut the lid down with a sucking sound on
the tentacle. Then the iris closed over the lid.
The goo had touched him on the glove. Pareti decided it was too much trouble to disinfect immediately. He
swiped absently at his thinning sun-bleached hair, falling over his eyes, and wheeled the punt around again.
He was about two miles from the TexasTower.
He was fifty miles out into the Atlantic.
He was off the coast of Hatteras, in Diamond Shoals.
He was at 35° latitude, 75° west longitude.
He was well into the goo fields.
He was exhausted. Shift’s end.
Screwin’ goo.
He began working his way back.
The sea was flat, and a long, steady swell rolled back toward the TexasTower. There was no wind, and the
sun shone hard and diamond as it had ever since the Third World War, brighter than it had ever shone before. It was
almost perfect harvesting weather, at five hundred and thirty dollars a shift.
Off to his left a ten-square-yard film of goo lay like a delicate tracery of gray, almost invisible against the
ocean. He altered course and expertly collected it. It offered no fight at all. Stretched too thin.
He continued toward the TexasTower, gathering goo as he skimmed. He rarely encountered the same shape
twice. The largest chunk he collected was disguised as a cyprus stump. (Stupid goo, he thought, who ever saw a cyprus
stump growing fifty miles out?) The smallest was a copy of a baby seal. Cadaverously gray and eyeless. Pareti gathered
each piece quickly, without hesitation: he had an uncanny aptitude for recognizing goo in any of its shapes, and a
flawless harvesting technique that was infinitely more refined and eloquent than the methods used by the Company-
trained harvesters. He was the dancer with natural rhythm, the painter who had never taken a lesson, the instinctive
tracker. It had been the impetus that had led him here to the goo fields when he had graduated Summa Cum from
the Multiversity, rather than into industry or one of the cattle-prod think-factories. Everything he had learned, all the
education he had gotten; of what use was it in a clogged choking jamcrowded world of twenty-seven billion
overcrowded people, all scrabbing for the most demeaning jobs? Anyone could get an education, a few less got their
degrees, even less got their gold seals, and a handful--like Joe Pareti--came out the other end of the Multiversity slide-
trough with a degree, a doctorate, a gold seal and the double--a rating. And none of it was worth his natural instinct
for goo harvesting.