"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

atmosphere had been enough to change the Indian Ocean monsoon patterns for good, triggering global
repercussions; this meant, in practice, almost everything that happened. This week for instance it was
tornadoes, previously confined almost entirely to North America, as a kind of freak of that continent’s
topography and latitude, but now appearing in East Africa and in Central Asia. Last week it had been the
weakening of the Great World Ocean Current in the Indian Ocean rather than the Atlantic.

“Unbelievable,” Frank would say.

“I know. Isn’t it great?”

Before leaving for home at the end of the day, Frank often passed by another source of news, the little
room filled with file cabinets and copy machines, informally called “The Department of Unfortunate
Statistics.” Someone had started to tape on the beige walls of this room extra copies of pages that held
interesting statistics or other bits of recent quantitative information. No one knew who had started the
tradition, but now it was clearly a communal thing.

The oldest ones were headlines, things like:

WORLDBANKPRESIDENTSAYSFOURBILLIONLIVE ONLESSTHANTWODOLLARS ADAY

or

AMERICA:FIVEPERCENT OFWORLDPOPULATION,FIFTYPERCENT OFCORPORATEO
WNERSHIP

Later pages were charts or tables of figures out of journal articles, or short articles of a quantitative
nature out of the scientific literature.

When Frank went by on this day, Edgardo was in there at the coffee machine, as he so often was,
looking at the latest. It was another headline:
352 RICHESTPEOPLEOWN ASMUCH AS THEPOORESTTWOBILLION,SAYSCANADIANF
OODPROJECT

“I don’t think this can be right,” Edgardo declared.

“How so?” Frank said.

“Because the poorest two billion have nothing, whereas the richest three hundred and fifty-two have a
big percentage of the world’s total capital. I suspect it would take the poorest four billion at least to
match the top three hundred and fifty.”

Anna came in as he was saying this, and wrinkled her nose as she went to the copying machine. She
didn’t like this kind of conversation, Frank knew. It seemed to be a matter of distaste for belaboring the
obvious. Or distrust in the data. Maybe she was the one who had taped up the brief quote:72.8% of all
statistics are made up on the spot.

Frank, wanting to bug her, said, “What do you think, Anna?”

“About what?”