"Richard Wilson - Mother to the World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Richard)

How the Population Crisis Was Solved.
What Next? or, if You Don't Do It, Marty, Who the Hell
Will?
From his notebooks:
Thank God for movies. We'd be outen our minds by now
if I hadn't taught myself to be a projectionist.
Radio City Music Hall apparently's only movie on Con
Ed's EE list. Bit roomy for Siss and me but getting used to it.
Sometimes she sits way down front, I in mezzanine, and we
shout to each other when Gregory Peck does heroic things.
Collected first runs to add to 81/2 from all major Manhat-
tan houses Capitol, Criterion, Cinema I & II, State, etc.so
we have good backlog. Also, if Siss likes, we run it again right
away or next night. I don't mind. Then there are the 42nd St.
houses and the art houses and the nabes & Mod. Museum film
library. Shouldn't run out for a long time.
Days are for exploring and shopping. I go armed because
of the animals. Siss stays home at hotel.
(Why are there animals? Find out. Where find out; how?)
 The dogs in packs are worst. So far they haven't attacked
and a shot fired in the air scares them off. So far.
Later they left the city. It had been too great a strain to
live a life half primitive, half luxurious. The contrast was too
much. And the rats were getting bolder. The rats and the
dogs.
They had lived there at first for the convenience. He picked
a hotel on Park Avenue. He put Siss in a single room and
took a suite down the hall for himself.
He guessed correctly that there'd be huge refrigerators and
freezers stocked with food enough for years.
The hotel, with its world-famous name, was one of the
places the Consolidated Edison Company had boasted was
on its Emergency Electricity net, along with City Hall, the
Empire State Building, the tunnels and bridges, Governors
Island and other key installations. The EE net, worked out
for Civil Defense (what had ever become of Civil Defense?),
guaranteed uninterrupted electricity to selected customers
through the use of deep underground grids and conduits,
despite flood, fire, pestilence or war. A promotional piece
claimed that only total annihilation could knock out the
system.
There was a hint of the way it worked in a slogan that Con
Ed considered using before the government censors decided
it would have given too much away: ". . . as long as the
Hudson flows."
Whatever the secret, he and Siss had electricity, from
which so many blessings flowed, for as long as they stayed in
the city.
From his notebooks:
I've renamed our hotel the Living End. Siss calls it our