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

He snorted in self-depreciation. "I had already been left far behind. Half
the time I couldn't even follow the science, medical, and space articles in
Time and Newsweek, though they were written for the layman. I never did
figure out what lasers were, and the workings of computers simply floored
me; I recall reading about one fellow programming a computer to play
chess and it beat a chess buff. Space travel was all very interesting to
watch on TV but when I tried to read a bit about it, I was at sea instead of
in space. The simplest articles on the subject were too technical for me.
The data banks, which were just beginning to start up in earnest… I read
of a new storage device which would allow for every book in the Library of
Congress to be stored in an area a couple of square feet in size. Things like
that simply boggled my mind. I gave up trying to keep up. But what's the
point, Edie?"
"Your studying, Jule. Oh, I admire your spirit—trying to catch up, at
least to the point where you can conduct your daily life rationally in this
world of the twenty-first century, as it would have been called under the
old calendar. Most important, of course, is learning Interlingua, and there
is no reason you can't do that. But the magnitude of the rest of your
problem is appalling."
 It was unreasonable, he knew, but nevertheless he was irritated. "Why?
I'm only a bit more than a generation behind you. There is no difference
between my brain and yours. I'm not stupid. I can take the same classes
your young people take. I can catch up."
She sighed. "Jule—Jule… You are going to have to start from absolute
scratch. The education you had, a bachelor's degree, is now meaningless.
By the time you are through the equivalent of what you used to call
grammar school, human knowledge will have doubled again. It will be 512
times what it was when you were a child in 1940."
"I don't want or expect to develop into a nuclear scientist. If the kids
can pick up an ordinary layman's education, I can too," he said
stubbornly. "We've been over this before."
She shook her head in despair. "Even that, Jule. Today's children take
chemical and electronic stimulants—temporarily, while they are
studying—to increase their intelligence quotients and receptivity."
"Well, why can't I take them too?"
"Because you are in your middle thirties. Actually, of course, you are
pushing seventy, but physically and mentally you are a man in his thirties.
You see, Jule, a person continues to grow, both mentally and physically,
until he is approximately twenty-five years of age. From then on, he begins
to deteriorate. We can slow down the process, but we cannot eliminate it
entirely. The stimulants we utilize to increase intelligence and learning
aptitude work best on youth. After the age of twenty-five, they slack off in
effectiveness. Indeed, at the age of fifty or so, they are meaningless.
Perhaps this will be overcome in the future, as new advances are made in
the field, but for the present the use of such stimulants would not do you
very much good."
"Jesus!" Julian protested. "So even the eight-year-olds have a head start
on me."
"In more ways than one," she agreed unhappily. "This is their world:
they were born into it; they are perfectly at home in it. For you, it is as