"Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

send me back a message saying I was right."
"You — you really can see into the future?" said Constant. The skin of his face tightened, felt
parched. His palms perspired.
"In a punctual way of speaking — yes," said Rumfoord. "When I ran my space ship into the
chrono-synclastic infundibulum, it came to me in a flash that everything that ever has been
always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been." He chuckled again. "Knowing
that rather takes the glamour out of fortunetelling — makes it the simplest, most obvious thing
imaginable."
"You told your wife everything that was going to happen to her?" said Constant. This was a
glancing question. Constant had no interest in what was going to happen to Rumfoord's wife. He
was ravenous for news of himself. In asking about Rumfoord's wife, he was being coy.
"Well — not everything," said Rumfoord. "She wouldn't let me tell her everything. What little
I did tell her quite spoiled her appetite for more."
"I — I see," said Constant, not seeing at all.
"Yes," said Rumfoord genially, "I told her that you and she were to be married on Mars." He
shrugged. "Not married exactly — " he said, "but bred by the Martians — like farm animals."

Winston Niles Rumfoord was a member of the one true American class. The class was a true
one because its limits had been clearly defined for at least two centuries — clearly defined for
anyone with an eye for definitions. From Rumfoord's small class had come a tenth of America's
presidents, a quarter of its explorers, a third of its Eastern Seaboard governors, a half of its full-
time ornithologists, three-quarters of its great yachtsmen, and virtually all of its underwriters of
the deficits of grand opera. It was a class singularly free of quacks, with the notable exception of
political quacks. The political quackery was a means of gaining office — and was never carried
into private life. Once in office, members of the class became, almost without exception,
magnificently responsible.
If Rumfoord accused the Martians of breeding people as though people were no better than
farm animals, he was accusing the Martians of doing no more than his own class had done. The
strength of his class depended to some extent on sound money management — but depended to a
much larger extent on marriages based cynically on the sorts of children likely to be produced.
Healthy, charming, wise children were the desiderata.
The most competent, if humorless, analysis of Rumfoord's class is, beyond question, Waltham
Kittredge's The American Philosopher Kings. It was Kittredge who proved that the dass was in
fact a family, with its loose ends neatly turned back into a hard core of consanguinity through the
agency of cousin marriages. Rumfoord and his wife, for instance, were third cousins, and
detested each other.
And when Rumfoord's class was diagramed by Kittredge, it resembled nothing so much as the
hard, ball-like knot known as a monkey's fist.
Waltham Kittredge often floundered in his The American Philosopher Kings, trying to
translate the atmosphere of Rumfoord's class into words. Like the college professor he was,
Kittredge groped only for big words, and, finding no apt ones, he coined a lot of untranslatable
new ones.
 Of all Kittredge's jargon, only one term has ever found its way into conversation. The term is
un-neurotic courage.
It was that sort of courage, of course, that carried Winston Niles Rumfoord out into space. It
was pure courage — not only pure of lusts for fame and money, but pure of any drives that
smack of the misfit or screwball.
There are, incidentally, two strong, common words that would have served handsomely, one
or the other, in place of all of Kittredge's jargon. The words are style and gallantry.
When Rumfoord became the first person to own a private space ship, paying fifty-eight