"Pohl, Frederik - Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

Spending a Day at the Lottery FairSPENDINE A DAY AT THE LOTTERY FAIR

by Frederik Pohl
Version 1.0



All writers have favorite themes and return to them over and over-even when they
don't intend to and perhaps, as in my own case, don't realize quite how often
they've done so until it comes time to put a collection of stories together.
Their excuse (which I do dearly hope you will find justified in the present
examples) is that a new treatment, a new setting, a new angle of attack can
refresh an argument-especially an argument that seems worth making in the first
place. At any rate, this story came about in the summer of 1982, when curiosity
led me to Knoxville to see how they were doing with their first-ever world's
fair. I am no great connoisseur of world's fairs; I'd only been to three before
Knoxville-the pair in New York City a generation apart and the 1970 event in
Osaka, Japan. Knoxville was a much smaller spectacle. Still, it had a lot of
interesting exhibits and a holiday-carnival atmosphere; I had a good time. The
locals I talked to seemed to be enjoying it a lot less, and when I asked them
why so glum, they reported that it was losing money by the fistful and pot. What
then (I wondered) was the reason for having it? Echo gave me an answer, and so I
went back to my hotel room and began writing this story.
They were the Baxter family, Randolph and Millicent the parents, with their
three children, Emma and Simon and Louisa, who was the littlest; and they didn't
come to the fair in any old bus. No, they drove up in a taxi, all the way from
their home clear on the other side of town, laughing and poking each other, and
when they got out, Randolph Baxter gave the driver a really big tip. It wasn't
that he could really afford it. It was just because he felt it was the right
thing to do. When you took your whole family to the Lottery Fair, Baxter
believed, you might as well do it in style. Besides, the fare was only money.
Though Millicent Baxter pursed her lips when she saw the size of the tip, she
certainly was not angry; her eyes sparkled as brightly as the children's, and
together they stared at the facade of the Lottery Fair.
Even before you got through the gates there was a carnival smell, buttered
popcorn and cotton candy and tacos all together, and a carnival sound of
merry-go-round organs and people screaming in the rollercoaster, and bands and
bagpipes from far away. A clown stalked on tall stilts through the fairgoers
lining up at the ticket windows, bending down to chuck children under the chin
and making believe to nibble the ears of teenage girls in bright summer shorts.
Rainbow fountains splashed perfumey spray. People in cartoon-character costumes,
Gus the Ghost and Mickey Mouse and Pac-Man, handed out free surprise packages to
the kids; when Simon opened his it was a propeller beanie, a fan for Emma, for
little Louisa cardboard glasses with a Groucho Marx mustache. And crowded! You
could hardly believe such crowds! Off to one side of the parking lot the tour
buses were rolling in with their loads of foreign visitors, Chinese and Argen
tines and Swedes; they had special entrances and were waved through by special
guards who greeted them, some of the time anyway, in their own native languages-
"Willkommen! and "Bon jour! and "Ey there, mate! -as long as they didn't speak
anything like Urdu or SerboCroatian, anyway. For the foreign tourists didn't