"Stanislaw Lem - Ijon Tichy 03 - The Futurological Congress" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

discussion). Stan Hazelton of the U.S. delegation immediately threw the hall into a flurry by emphatically
repeating: 4, 6, 11, and therefore 22; 5, 9, hence 22; 3, 7, 2, 11, from which it followed that 22 and only
22!! Someone jumped up, saying yes but 5, and what about 6, 18, or 4 for that matter; Hazelton
countered this objection with the crushing retort that, either way, 22. I turned to the number key in his
paper and discovered that 22 meant the end of the world. Hayakawa from Japan was next; he presented
plans, newly developed in his country, for the house of the future—eight hundred levels with maternity
wards, nurseries, schools, shops, museums, zoos, theaters, skating rinks and crematoriums. The
blueprints provided for underground storage of the ashes of the dear departed, forty-channel television,
intoxication chambers as well as sobering tanks, special gymnasiums for group sex (an indication of the
progressive attitude of the architects), and catacombs for nonconformist subculture communities. One
rather novel idea was to have each family change its living quarters every day, moving from apartment to
apartment like chessmen—say, pawns or knights. That would help alleviate boredom. In any event this
building, having a volume of seventeen cubic kilometers, a foundation set in the ocean floor and a roof
that reached the very stratosphere, would possess its own matrimonial computers—matchmaking on the
sadomasochistic principle, for partners of such opposite persuasions statistically made the most stable
marriages (each finding in that union the answer to his or her dreams)—and there would also be a
round-the-clock suicide prevention center. Hakayawa, the second Japanese delegate, demonstrated for
us a working model of such a house—on a scale of 10,000 to 1. It had its own oxygen supply, but
without food or water reserves, since the building would operate entirely on the recycling principle: all
waste products, excreta and effluvia, would be reclaimed and reprocessed for consumption. Yahakawa,
the third on the team, read a list of all the delicacies that could be reconstituted from human excrement.
Among these were artificial bananas, gingerbread, shrimp, lobster, and even artificial wine which,
notwithstanding its rather offensive origin, in taste rivaled the finest burgundies of France. Samples of it
were available in the hall, in elegant little bottles, and there were also cocktail sausages wrapped in foil,
though no one seemed to be particularly thirsty, and the sausages were discreetly deposited under chairs.
Seeing which, I did the same. The original plan was to have this house of the future be mobile, by means
of a powerful propeller, thereby making collective sightseeing excursions possible, but that was ruled out
because, first of all, there would be 900 million houses to begin with and, secondly, all travel would be
pointless. For even if a house had 1,000 exits and its occupants employed them all, they would never be
able to leave the building; by the time the last was out, a whole new generation of occupants would have
reached maturity inside. The Japanese were clearly delighted with their own proposal. Then Norman
Youhas from the United States took the floor and outlined seven different measures to halt the population
explosion, namely: mass media and mass arrests, compulsory celibacy, full-scale deeroticization,
onanization, sodomization, and for repeated offenders—castration. Every married couple would be
required to compete for the right to have children, passing examinations in three categories, copulational,
educational and nondeviational. All illegal offspring would be confiscated; for premeditated birth, the
guilty parties could face life sentences. Attached to this report were those detachable sky-blue
coupons—sex rations—we had received earlier with the conference materials. Hazelton and Youhas then
proposed the establishment of new occupations: connubial prosecutor, divorce counselor, perversion
recruiter and sterility consultant. Copies of a draft for a new penal code, in which fertilization constituted
a major felony, tantamount to high treason against the species, were promptly passed around. Meanwhile
someone in the spectator gallery hurled a Molotov cocktail into the hall. The police squad (on hand in the
lobby, evidently prepared for such an eventuality) took the necessary steps, and a maintenance crew (no
less prepared) quickly covered the broken furniture and corpses with a large nylon tarpaulin which was
decorated in a cheerful pattern. Between reports I tried to decipher the local papers, and even though my
Spanish was practically nonexistent, I did learn that the government had summoned armored units to the
capital, put all law enforcement agencies on extreme alert, and declared a general state of emergency.
Apparently no one in the audience besides myself grasped the seriousness of the situation developing
outside the hotel walls. At seven we adjourned for supper—at our expense, this time—and on my way
back to the conference I bought a special evening edition of Nación, the official newspaper, as well as a