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

governments, terrified by what they had done to themselves and each other, banded together at last.
The United Nations had been rebuilt, and they had commissioned the Companies to solve the problems of
artificial foodstuffs. But it was a slow process.
What they had only dimly realized was that the Westerly Winds, carrying all the radiation and residue of
bacteriological lunacy, had swept across the North American continent, picking up their additional loads at the
Smokies, Louisville, Detroit, New York, and had carried the polluted and deadly cargo across the Eastern Seaboard,
across the Atlantic, to dissipate finally in the jetstream over Asia. But not before massive fallout off the Carolinas had
combined with sunlight and rain to produce a strange mutation in the plankton-rich waters of Diamond Shoals.
Ten years after the end of the Third World War, the plankton had become something else. It was called goo
by the fishermen of the Outer Banks.
Diamond Shoals had become a cauldron of creation.
The goo spread. It adapted. It metamorphosed. And there was panic. Deformed exo-skeletal fish swam in
the shallow waters; four new species of dog shark were found (one was a successful adaptation) ; a centipedal squid
with a hundred arms flourished for several years, then unaccountably vanished.
The goo did not vanish.
Experiments followed, and miraculously, what had seemed to be an imminent and unstoppable menace to
life on the seas, and probably on the planet as a whole...revealed itself as a miracle. It saved the world. The goo, when
“killed,” could be turned into artificial nourishment. It contained a wide spectrum of proteins, vitamins, amino acids,
carbohydrates, and even necessary minimum amounts of trace elements. When dehydrated and packaged, it was
economically rewarding. When combined with water it could be cooked, stewed, pan fried, boiled, baked, poached,
sautéed, stuffed or used as a stuffing. It was as close to the perfect food as had ever been found. Its flavor altered
endlessly, depending entirely on which patented processing system was used. It had many tastes, but no characteristic
taste.
Alive, it functioned on a quasi-vegetative level. An unstable protoplasmic agglomeration, it was apparently
unintelligent, though it had an undeniable urge toward form. It structured itself endlessly into rudimentary plant and
animal shapes, none viable. It was as if the goo desired to become something.
(It was hoped in the research labs of the Companies that the goo never discovered what it wanted to
become.)
“Killed,” it was a tasty meal.
Harvesting factories--the TexasTowers-were erected by each of the Companies, and harvesters were trained.
They drew the highest wages of any nontechnical occupation in the world. It was not due to the long hours, or the
exhausting labor. The pay was, in fact, legally referred to as “high-hazard pay.”
Joe Pareti had danced the educational pavane and had decided the tune was not nearly sprightly enough for
him. He became a harvester. He never really understood why all the credits being deposited in his account were
called high-hazard pay.
He was about to find out.
It was a song that ended in a scream. And then he woke up. The night’s sleep had held no rest. Eleven hours
on his back; eleven hours of helpless drudgery; and at last an escape, an absurd transition into exhausted wakefulness.
For a moment he lay there, he couldn’t move.
Then getting to his feet, he found himself fighting for balance. Sleep had not used him well.
Sleep had scoured his skin with emery paper.
Sleep had polished his fingers with diamond dust. Sleep had abraded his scalp.
Sleep had sand-blasted his eyes.
Oh dear God, he thought, feeling pain in every nerve ending. He stumbled to the toilet and hit the back of
his neck a sharp, short blast with the needle-spray of the shower head. Then he went to the mirror, and automatically
pulled his razor out of the charge niche. Then he looked at himself in the mirror, and stopped.
Sleep had: scoured his skin with emery paper, polished his fingers with diamond dust, abraded his scalp,
sandblasted his eyes.
It was barely a colorful way of putting it. Almost literally, that was what had happened to him while he had
slept.