"C M Kornbluth - Theory Of Rocketry" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

That night after dinner he tried to telephone Roland Fuqua, but service to his number had been
discontinued. Alarmed, he buzzed over on his scooter to Fuqua's apartment, one of a quarter million in
the Dearborn Village Development of Metropolitan Life and Medical. Roland's hulking, spoiled and
sullen boy Edward (who had unilaterally changed his name last year to Rocky) was the only person there,
and he was on his way out—"to an orgy with some pigs," if you believed him. He said "Little Rollo" was
now a night-shift lab assistant in a pet-food company's quality-control department and this was his
mother's Bingo night. "You want I should give a message?" he asked satirically, overplaying the role of
intolerably burdened youth.



"If it won't break your back," Mr. Edel said, "please ask your father to give me a ring sometime."



Again in his own small apartment, Mr. Edel thought of many things. Of the ancient papyrus which, when
decoded, moaned: "Children are not now as respectful and diligent as they were in the old days." Of
Henry V. Of Dr. Fuqua drudging away on petfood protein determinations and lucky to be doing that. Of
his own selfish, miserable, lonely comfort in his castle. Of Foster, the hero-king to be, and of himself,
Aristotle to the young Alexander. Had there been a dozen such in his twenty years? There had not. Marie
Perrone still sent him her novels, and they were almost popular and very bad. Jim Folwell had gone to
Princeton and into the foreign service and that was that. Janice Reeves and Ward Drei-man were married
and both teaching at Cornell. What had happened to the hundred thousand others he had taught only
God and themselves knew. If they all dropped dead at this instant, tomorrow morning some trucks would
not roll for an hour or two, some advertising agencies would come near to missing a few deadlines, some
milk would sour and some housewives would bang, perplexed, on the doors of shops that should be
open, a few sales would languish unclosed, a few machines would growl for lack of oil. But Foster might
land on the moons of Jupiter.



Therefore let him learn, make him learn, how to be great. He



would meet his Pistols, Bardolphs, Fluellens, a few Exeters, and without doubt his Cambridges and
Scroops: clowns, fuss-budgets, friends and traitors. It could matter to nobody except herself if her agent
ripped poor arty Marie Perrone up her back; it might matter a great deal to—he shied at the
alternatives—to, let us say, man, if Foster trusted a Pistol to do his work, or passed over a Fluellen for
his mannerisms, or failed to know a Scroop when he saw one.



We will arm the young hero-king, he thought comfortably just before sleep claimed him.



Roland Fuqua had been transferred to Toledo by the pet-food company. He wrote to Edel: