"Joe Haldeman - The Big Bang Theory Explained In Light Verse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

A method for dealing with logical goblins:
"Deluge it with money until it gets solved!"
It had cracked the world's most intractable problems.

It worked: they invented a magical box
Where he sat all day long, for dozens of years,
Cleansing his body of isotope pox
By exchanging atoms with poor volunteers.

He finally was clean! No Geiger could count
The tiniest click from his corpus pristine.
His eye on the future, he gleefully mount-
Ed his coffin-cum-time-space-and-money machine.

To backtrack again:
By creating a fortune so diverse and broad,
He'd created something resembling life:
It would feed and excrete; be active and nod,
And when confronted with problems or strife
Could act on its own, without consultation
Of the genius financial who'd sparked its creation.

Which suited him fine. He wanted to, know
Whether this creature of dollars and francs,
Without him, would simply continue to grow
Sucking up offices, factories, and banks,
Expanding its own ecological niche—
Quietly making him rich.

And it did—beyond his most fabulous dreams!
Not being omniscient, though, he couldn't know
He'd own the whole planet with his little scheme
And still have a hundred centuries to go.

It followed humanity out into space;
Annexing whole planets, and systems, and more,
Till it finally ran into a greedier race
And plunged the whole Galaxy into a war.

It won, though it took it some eight thousand years,
In which time humanity changed for the worse.
They stopped using money, stopped having careers—
They thought owning things was perverse!

The friendly machines that our hero'd entrusted
With all of his wealth had long ago rusted.
But their n-times-great-grandchildren covered the planet,
Waiting to wake up the man who once ran it.

But they spent a few centuries converting those dollars