"Pohl, Frederik - Day Million" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

companion of Aldebaran. Blue-hot or red-cool, he had seen a
thousand stars and their ten thousand planets. He had, in fact,
been travelling the starlanes, with only brief leaves on Earth,
for pushing two centuries. But you don't care about that,
either. It is people who make stories, not the circumstances
they find themselves in, and you want to hear about these two
people. Well, they made it. The great thing they had for each
other grew and flowered and burst into fruition on Wednes-
day, just as Dora had promised. They met at the encoding
room, with a couple of well-wishing friends apiece to cheer
them on, and while their identities were being taped and
stored they smiled and whispered to each other and bore the
jokes of their friends with blushing repartee. Then they
exchanged their mathematical analogues and went away,
Dora to her dwelling beneath the surface of the sea and Don
to his ship.
It was an idyll, really. They lived happily ever afteror
anyway, until they decided not to bother any more and died.
Of course, they never set eyes on each other again.
Oh, I can see you now, you eaters of charcoal-broiled
steak, scratching an incipient bunion with one hand and
holding this story with the other, while the stereo plays dindy
or Monk. You don't believe a word of it, do you? Not for one
minute. People wouldn't live like that, you say with a grunt as
you get up to put fresh ice in a drink.
And yet there's Dora, hurrying back through the flushing
commuter pipes toward her underwater home (she prefers it
there; has had herself somatically altered to breath the stuff).
If I tell you with what sweet fulfilment she fits the recorded
analogue of Don into the symbol manipulator, hooks herself in
and turns herself on ...if I try to tell you any of that you will
simply stare. Or glare; and grumble, what the hell kind of
love-making is this? And yet I assure you, friend, I really
do assure you that Dora's ecstasies are as creamy and passion-
ate as any of James Bond's lady spies', and one hell of a lot
more so than anything you are going to find in "real life." Go
ahead, glare and grumble. Dora doesn't care. If she thinks of
you at all, her thirty-times-great-great-grandfather, she thinks
you're a pretty primordial sort of brute. You are. Why, Dora
is farther removed from you than you are from the austra-
lopithecines of five thousand centuries ago. You could not
swim a second in the strong currents of her life. You don't
think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recog-
nize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponen-
tial curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it
goes it goes like a bomb. And you, you Scotch-drinking steak-
eater in your relaxacizing chair, you've just barely lighted the
primacord of the fuse. What is it now, the six or seven hundred
thousandth day after Christ? Dora lives in Day Million, the
millionth day of the Christian Era. Ten thousand years from