"Vonnegut, Kurt - Galapagos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

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She was seventy meters long.
The ship on which Charles Darwin was the unpaid naturalist, the _Beagle_, was only twenty-eight meters long.
When the _Bahнa de Darwin_ was launched in Malmц, eleven hundred metric tons of saltwater had to find someplace else to go. I was dead by then.
When the _Beagle_ was launched in Falmouth, England, only two hundred and fifteen metric tons of saltwater had to find someplace else to go.
The _Bahнa de Darwin_ was a metal motor ship.
The _Beagle_ was a sailboat made out of trees, and carried ten cannons for repelling pirates and savages.

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The two older cruise ships with which the _Bahнa de Darwin_ was meant to compete had gone out of business before the struggle could begin. Both had been booked to capacity for many months to come, but then, because of the financial crisis, they had been swamped with cancellations. They were anchored in backwaters of the marshland now, out of sight of the city, and far from any road or habitation. Their owners had stripped them of their electronic gear and other valuables -- in anticipation of a prolonged period of lawlessness.
Ecuador, after all, like the Galбpagos Islands, was mostly lava and ash, and so could not begin to feed its nine million people. It was bankrupt, and so could no longer buy food from countries with plenty of topsoil, so the seaport of Guayaquil was idle, and the people were beginning to starve to death.
Business was business.

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Neighboring Peru and Colombia were bankrupt, too. The only ship at the Guayaquil waterfront other than the _Bahнa de Darwin_ was a rusty Colombian freighter, the _San Mateo_, stranded there for want of the means to buy food or fuel. She was anchored offshore, and had been there so long that an enormous raft of vegetable matter had built up around her anchor line. A baby elephant might have reached the Galбpagos Islands on. a raft that size.
Mexico and Chile and Brazil and Argentina were likewise bankrupt -- and Indonesia and the Philippines and Pakistan and India and Thailand and Italy and Ireland and Belgium and Turkey. Whole nations were suddenly in the same situation as the _San Mateo_, unable to buy with their paper money and coins, or their written promises to pay later, even the barest essentials. Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizens as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for money. They were suddenly saying to people with nothing but paper representations of wealth, "Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think paper was so valuable?"

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There was still plenty of food and fuel and so on for all the human beings on the planet, as numerous as they had become, but millions upon millions of them were starting to starve to death now. The healthiest of them could go without food for only about forty days, and then death would come.
And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
It was all in people's heads. People had simply changed their opinions of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg.









6



This financial crisis, which could never happen today, was simply the latest in a series of murderous twentieth century catastrophes which had originated entirely in human brains. From the violence people were doing to themselves and each other, and to all other living things, for that matter, a visitor from another planet might have assumed that the environment had gone haywire, and that the people were in such a frenzy because Nature was about to kill them all.
But the planet a million years ago was as moist and nourishing as it is today -- and unique, in that respect, in the entire Milky Way. All that had changed was people's opinion of the place.
To the credit of humanity as it used to be: More and more people were saying that their brains were irresponsible, unreliable, hideously dangerous, wholly unrealistic -- were simply no damn good.
In the microcosm of the Hotel El Dorado, for example, the widow Mary Hepburn, who had been taking all her meals in her room, was cursing her own brain sotto voce for the advice it was giving her, which was to commit suicide.
"You are my enemy," she whispered. "Why would I want to carry such a terrible enemy inside of me?" She had been a biology teacher in the public high school in Ilium, New York, now defunct, for a quarter of a century, and so was familiar with the very odd tale of the evolution of a then-extinct creature named by human beings the "Irish elk." "Given a choice between a brain like you and the antlers of an Irish elk," she told her own central nervous system, "I'd take the antlers of the Irish elk."
These animals used to have antlers the size of ballroom chandeliers. They were fascinating examples, she used to tell her students, of how tolerant nature could be of clearly ridiculous mistakes in evolution. Irish elk survived for two and a half million years, in spite of the fact that their antlers were too unwieldy for fighting or self-defense, and kept them from seeking food in thick forests and heavy brush.

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Mary had also taught that the human brain was the most admirable survival device yet produced by evolution. But now her own big brain was urging her to take the polyethylene garment bag from around a red evening dress in her closet there in Guayaquil, and to wrap it around her head, thus depriving her cells of oxygen.