"Pohl, Frederik - A Day In The Life Of Able Charlie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

A Day In The Life Of Able CharlieA DAY IN THE LIFE OF ABLE CHARLIE

by Frederik Pohl
Version 1.0



Like "Rem the Rememberer (and also like "The Way It Was, both also in this
volume), this story was written for a special purpose: It was to be part of an
advertising campaign some visionary adman had dreamed up to run in the pages of
Scientific American. True to form, about the time I finished the story I got a
call from the adman to say, shamefacedly, that his boss had hated the campaign
and so it was canceled as of that morning. This time the jinx did not stop
there. About the time I was trying to decide whether I wanted to publish the
story myself in Galaxy (which I was then editing) or offer it to some other
publication, I discovered in the incoming manuscripts from authors a Stephen
Goldin story called "Sweet Dreams, Melissa. To my horror, it was very like this
one-worse, it was a good story. I could not honorably reject it; nor could I, I
felt, allow my own to be published anywhere near it. So I tucked the story away
for several years, until a magazine called Creative Computing asked me for
something, and published it. So, unless you were a reader of computer magazines
a decade ago, there's no way you could have seen this story before. . . and if
it sounds at all familiar, it's probably because you've read "Sweet Dreams,
Melissa.
The time was 0900:00 A.M. and Charlie woke up. The first thing he had to do was
to find out who he was that day, and so he explored his memory. He discovered
that he was a white male American, thirty-two years old, married, employed in
the sales department of a public utility company. He had two children, a boy and
a girl. He had made $17,400 in the year just past, and if it hadn't been for
Harriet's part-time teaching salary he didn't know how they would have managed.
He still owed over $19,000 on their $38,000 house, $1,900 on the car, and nearly
a thousand on the loan for modernizing the kitchen they had taken out two years
before. Moreover, his daughter, Florence, had unfortunately inherited his bite,
and so the orthodontist was going to cost him fifteen hundred dollars very soon.
Charlie discovered that many of his thoughts were of money.
However, his memory contained many other things. He became aware that he was a
fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and that he had volunteered as a Little League
coach against the day when his four-year-old son, Chuck, was old enough to play.
Charlie remembered that he was inclined to favor Chuck over the girl. It was
curious that he could not remember what color Chuck's hair was, or whether
Florence was doing well in school, but Charlie didn't realize that it was
curious and so he continued to explore his memory.
He was a heavy smoker, drank a can of beer now and then, especially in hot
weather, but didn't go much for the hard stuff. Although he liked looking at
other women, he did not go beyond looking. Although he enjoyed a game of poker
twice a month, he did not care to gamble heavy stakes. He drove a small foreign
car (it was not clear whether it was a Datsun. a VW, or a Fiat), on which he got
24.7 miles to the gallon in everyday use and nearly 29 miles a gallon on the
road. (He did not know what color it was. it did not occur to him to wonder
why.) Charlie remembered that he was active in his party's politics (he did not