"Harry Harrison - Make room Make room" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

But the results of such projections, while instructive, are also preposterous. We know things won't
work out that way as far as the numbers living in cities are concerned. Moreover, we are completely
ignorant of future trends in urban living conditions. We must leave these to our imaginations—or
better yet to the talented imaginations of writers like Harry Harrison. Make Room! Make Room!
presents a gripping scenario of where current trends may be leading. Such scenarios are important
tools in helping us to think about the future, and in bringing home to people the possible
consequences of our collective behavior. When such a serious goal can be achieved through an
engrossing work of fiction we are doubly rewarded. Thank you, Harry Harrison.
Paul R. Ehrlich



PROLOGUE
In December, 1959, The President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, said: "This
government... will not... as long as I am here, have a positive political doctrine in its program that has
to do with this problem of birth control. That is not our business." It has not been the business of any
American government since that time.
In 1950 the United States—with just 9.5 per cent of the world's population—was consuming 50 per
cent of the world's raw materials. This percentage keeps getting bigger and within fifteen years, at the
present rate of growth, the United States will be consuming over 83 per cent of the annual output of
the earth's materials. By the end of the century, should our population continue to increase at the
same rate, this country will need more than 100 per cent of the planet's resources to maintain our
current living standards. This is a mathematical impossibility—aside from the fact that there will be
about seven billion people on this earth at that time and—perhaps—they would like to have some of
the raw materials too.
In which case, what will the world be like?


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Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison




MONDAY, AUGUST 9, 1999
NEW YORK CITY—stolen from the trusting Indians by the wily Dutch, taken from the law-abiding
Dutch by the warlike British, then wrested in turn from the peaceful British by the revolutionary
colonials. Its trees were burned decades ago, its hills leveled and the fresh ponds drained and filled,
while the crystal springs have been imprisoned underground and spill their pure waters directly into
the sewers. Reaching out urbanizing tentacles from its island home, the city has become a
megalopolis with four of its five boroughs blanketing half of one island over a hundred miles long,
engulfing another island, and sprawling up the Hudson River onto the mainland of North America.
The fifth and original borough is Manhattan: a slab of primordial granite and metamorphic rock
bounded on all sides by water, squatting like a steel and stone spider in the midst of its web of
bridges, tunnels, tubes, cables and ferries. Unable to expand outward, Manhattan has writhed upward,
feeding on its own flesh as it tears down the old buildings to replace them with the new, rising higher
and still higher—yet never high enough, for there seems to be no limit to the people crowding here.
They press in from the outside and raise their families, and their children and their children's children
raise families, until this city is populated as no other city has ever been in the history of the world.
On this hot day in August in the year 1999 there are—give or take a few thousand—thirty-five