"Mack Reynolds - Equality in the Year 2000" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Mack)

"We are free today substantially; but the day will come when our
Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because
wealth will become concentrated in the hands of a few. A Republic cannot
exist upon bayonets; and when that day comes, when the wealth of the
nation is in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the
best elements of the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the
changed conditions."
James Madison, 4th President of the U.S. Father of the Constitution
 Chapter One
The Year 2 New Calendar
Old people's skills, experience, and knowledge seldom make them
authorities, and are no longer critical factors in our culture. The speed
and pervasiveness of social change now transforms the world within a
generation, so that the experience of the old becomes largely irrelevant
to the young.
—Irving Roscow, Social Scientist



When Edith Leete entered the sanctum of the Leete apartment in the
high-rise building in the Julian West University City that morning, Julian
was sitting at the desk before the auto-teacher. The expression on his face
was one of sour despair.
He was a man in his mid-thirties. Youthfully fresh of complexion,
handsome in the British aristocrat tradition, hair dark and thick, touches
of premature gray at the temples and a small amount in his mustache, flat
of stomach, square of shoulders, medium tall. There was a certain
vulnerable quality about his eyes and mouth which women had always
found attractive, though he had never known that.
She said, "Bon maten, Jule."'
"Bon maten," he muttered, not quite graciously.
"How goes the study of Interlingua?" she asked in English.
'Jupli mi legas gin. Des malpli mi komrenas gin.''
"Pri kio vi paroles? What are you saying? The more you study it the less
you understand it?"
"I wish to hell you people had stuck to English, instead of dreaming up
this new international language."
She sank down in a seat and let her hands flop limply over the chair
arms. "Nonsense, Jule. Interlingua is a scientific language. It works. Take
spelling and pronunciation. They are absolutely phonetic and there are
only five vowel sounds, where most of the old languages have twenty or
more. Each letter has one sound only, and a sound is always indicated by
the same letter. English was a bastard language—goodness knows how
anyone ever learned it, including me. Take the word can. It means a
container; it can also be a verb meaning to can something in a container;
it also means you can, or are able to, do something; and it also means,
spelled C-a-n-n-e-s, a town in southern France. In American idiom it
could mean to dismiss or fire someone, and in British idiom it meant a
tankard.
"Or take this sentence: 'There are three ways of spelling to." Now how