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

At the speed he harvested, he could earn more than a projects engineer.
After twelve hours of shift, out on the glare-frosted sea, even that satisfaction was dulled by exhaustion. He
only wanted to hit the bunk in his stateroom. And sleep. And sleep. He threw the soggy cigar stub into the sea.
The structure loomed up before him. It was traditionally called a TexasTower, yet it bore no resemblance to
the original offshore drilling rigs of pre-Third War America. It looked, instead, like an articulated coral reef or the
skeleton of some inconceivable aluminum whale.
The TexasTower was a problem in definition. It could be moved, therefore it was a ship: it could be
fastened irrevocably to the ocean bottom, therefore it was an island. Above the surface there was a cat’s cradle
network of pipes : feeder tubes into which the goo was fed by the harvesters (as Pareti now fed his load, hooking the
lazarette’s collapsible tube nozzle onto the monel metal hardware of the TexasTower’s feeder tube, feeling the tube
pulse as the pneumatic suction was applied, sucking the goo out of the punt’s storage bins), pipe racks to moor the
punts, more pipes to support the radar mast.
There was a pair of cylindrical pipes that gaped open like howitzers. The entry ports. Below the waterline,
like an iceberg, the TexasTower spread and extended itself, with collapsible sections that could be extended or folded
away as depth and necessity demanded. Here in Diamond Shoals, several dozen of the lowest levels had been folded
inoperative.
It was shapeless, ungainly, slow-moving, impossible to sink in a hurricane, more ponderous than a galleon. As
a ship, it was unquestionably the worst design in nautical history; but as a factory, it was a marvel.
Pareti climbed out of the mooring complex, carrying his net-pole, and entered the nearest entry port. He
went through the decontamination and storage locks, and was puffed inside the TexasTower proper. Swinging down
the winding aluminum staircase, he heard voices rising from below. It was Mercier, about to go on-shift, and Peggy
Flinn, who had been on sick call for the last three days with her period. The two harvesters were arguing.
“They’re processing it out at fifty-six dollars a ton,” Peggy was saying, her voice rising. Apparently they had
been at it for some time. They were discussing harvester bonuses.
“Before or after it fragments?” Mercier demanded.
“Now you know damn well that’s after-frag weight,” she snapped back. “Which means every ton we snag out
here gets tanked through and comes up somewhere around forty or forty-one tons after radiation. We’re getting bonus
money on Tower weight, not frag weight!”
Pareti had heard it a million times before in his three years on the goo fields. The goo was sent back to the
cracking and radiation plants when the bins were full. Subjected to the various patented techniques of the master
processing companies the goo multiplied itself molecule for molecule, fragmented, grew, expanded, swelled, and
yielded forty times its own original weight of goo. Which was then “killed” and reprocessed as the basic artificial
foodstuff of a population diet long-since a stranger to steaks and eggs and carrots and coffee. The Third War had been
a terrible tragedy in that it had killed off enormous quantities of everything except people.
The goo was ground up, reprocessed, purified, vitamin-supplemented, colored, scented, accented,
individually packaged under a host of brand names--VitaGram; Savor; Deelish; Gratifood; Sweetmeat; Quench-Caffé;
Family Treatall--and marketed to twenty-seven billion open and waiting mouths. Merely add thrice-reprocessed
water and serve.
The harvesters were literally keeping the world alive.
And even at five hundred and thirty dollars per shift, some of them felt they were being underpaid.
Pared clanked down the last few steps and the two arguing harvesters looked up at him. “Hi, Joe.” Mercier
said. Peggy smiled.
“Long shift?” she asked archly.
“Long enough. I’m whacked out.”
She stood a little straighter. “Completely?”
Pareti rubbed at his eyes. They felt grainy; he had been getting more dust in them than usual. “I thought it
was that-time-of-the-month for you?”
“Aw gone,” she grinned, spreading her hands like a little girl whose measles have vanished.
“Yeah, that’d be nice,” Pareti accepted her service, “if you’ll throw in a back rub.”
“And I’ll crack your spine.”