"Frederik Pohl - The Man Who Ate The World (v1.1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

Kathryn Pender came back with a punchcard in her hand. "It was one of ours, all right. Used to be a busboy in the cafeteria at the beach club." She scowled. "That Trumie!"
"You can't blame him," Garrick said reasonably. "He's only trying to be good."
She looked at him queerly. "He's only--"
Roosenburg interrupted with an exultant cry. "Got it! Okay, you-sit up and start telling us what Trumie's up to now!"
The fisherman figure said obligingly, "Yes, Boss. What You wanna know?"
What they wanted to know, they asked; and what they asked, it told them, volunteering nothing, concealing nothing.
There was Anderson Trumie, king of his island, the compulsive consumer.
It was like an echo of the bad old days of the Age of Plenty, when the world was smothering under the endless, pounding flow of goods from the robot factories and the desperate race between consumption and production strained the whole society. But Trumie's orders came not from society, but from within. Consumel commanded something inside him, and Use! it cried, and Devour! it ordered. And Trumie obeyed, heroically.
They listened to what the fisherman robot had to say, and the picture was dark. Armies had sprung up on North Guardian; navies floated in its waters. Anderson Trumie stalked among his creations like a blubbery god, wrecking and ruling. Garrick could see the pattern in what the fisherman had to say. In Trumie's mind, he was dictator, building a war machine. He was supreme engineer, constructing a mighty state. He was warrior.
"He was playing tin soldiers," said Roger Garrick, and Roosenburg and the girl nodded.
"The trouble is," Roosenburg said, "he has stopped playing. Invasion fleets, Garrick! He isn't content with North Guardian any more. He wants the rest of the country, too!"
"You can't blame him," said Roger Garrick for the third time, and stood up. "The question is, what do we do about it?"

"That's what you're here for," Kathryn told him.
"All right. We can forget about the soldiers-as soldiers, that is. They won't hurt anyone. Robots can't."
"I know that," Kathryn snapped.
"The problem is what to do about Trumie's drain on the world's resources." Garrick pursed his lips. "According to my directive from Area Control, the first plan was to let him alone-there is still plenty of everything for anyone, so why not let Trumie enjoy himself? But that didn't work out too well."
"Didn't work out too well," repeated Kathryn Pender bitterly.

"No, no-not on your local level," Garrick explained quickly. "After all, what are a few thousand robots, a few hundred million dollars' worth of equipment? We could resupply this area in a week."
"And in a week," said Roosenburg, "Trumie would have us cleaned out again!"
"That's the trouble," Garrick declared. "He doesn't seem to have a stopping point. Yet we can't refuse his orders. Speaking as a psychist, that would set a very bad precedent. It would put ideas in the minds of a lot of persons-minds that, in some cases, might not prove stable in the absence of a completely reliable source of everything they need, on request. If we say no to Trumie, we open the door on some mighty dark corners of the human mind. Covetousness. Greed. Pride of possession-"
"So what are you going to do?" demanded Kathryn Pender.
Garrick said resentfully: "The only thing there is to do. I'm going to look over Trumie's folder again. And then I'm going to North Guardian Island."

Roger Garrick was all too aware of the fact that he was only twenty-four. But his age couldn't make a great deal of difference. The oldest and wisest psychist in Area Control's wide sphere might have been doubtful of success in as thorny a job as the one ahead.
He and Kathryn Pender warily started out at daybreak. Vapor was rising from the sea about them, and the little battery-motor of their launch whined softly beneath the keelson. Garrick sat patting the little box that contained their invasion equipment, while the girl steered.
'Me workshops of Fisherman's Island had been all night making some of the things in that box-not because they were so difficult to make, but because it had been a bad night. Big things were going on at North Guardian; twice, the power had been out entirely for an hour, while the demand on the lines from North Guardian took all the power the system could deliver.
The Sun was well up as they came within hailing distance of the Navy Yard.
Robots were hard at work; the Yard was bustling with activity. An overhead traveling crane, eight feet tall, laboriously lowered a prefabricated fighting top onto an eleven-foot aircraft carrier.
A motor torpedo boat-full-sized, this one was, not to scale -rocked at anchor just before the bow of their launch. Kathryn steered around it ignoring the hail from the robot lieutenant-j.g. at its rail.
She glanced at Garrick over her shoulder, her face taut. "It's-it's all mixed up."
Garrick nodded. The battleships were model-sized, the small boats full scale. In the city beyond the Yard, the pinnacle of the Empire State Building barely cleared the Pentagon, right next door. A soaring suspension bridge leaped out from the shore a quarter of a mile away and stopped short a thousand yards out, over empty water.
It was easy to understand-even for a psychist just out of school, on his first real assignment. Trumie was trying to run a world single-handed, and where there were gaps in his conception of what his world should be, the results showed.
"Get me battleships!" he ordered his robot supply clerks, and they found the only battleships there were in the world to copy, the child-sized, toy-scaled play battleships that still delighted kids.

"Get me an Air Force!" And a thousand model bombers were hastily put together.
"Build me a bridge!" But perhaps he had forgotten to say to where.
Garrick shook his head and focused on the world around him. Kathryn Pender was standing on a gray steel stage, the mooring line from their launch secured to what looked like a coast defense cannon-but only about four feet long. Garrick picked up the little box and leaped up to the stage beside her, She turned to look at the city.
"Hold on a second." He was opening the box, taking out two little cardboard placards. He turned her by the shoulder and, with pins from the box, attached one of the cards to her back. "Now me," he said, turning his back to her.
She read the placard dubiously:

I
AM A
SPY

"Garrick," she said, "you're sure you know what you're doing?"
"put it on!" She shrugged and pinned it to the back of his jacket.
Side by side, they entered the citadel of the enemy.
According to the fisherman robot Trumie lived in a gingerbread castle south of the Pentagon. Most of the robots got no chance to enter it. The city outside the castle was Trumie's kingdom, and he roamed about it, overseeing, changing, destroying, rebuilding. But inside the castle was his