"Stanislaw Lem. Sexplosion " - читать интересную книгу автора

some technical problems: What should wings be made out of? Won't they
tickle? Should they move? Will they get in a way? What to do with the halo?
What switch to choose for it and where to place it? And so forth. That's
when the diaster struck.
The chemical compound, code-named "antisex" was synthesized long ago,
almost in the seventies. Only a select group of experts knew about it. This
chemical that instantly was acknowledged to be a secret weapon was created
in the labs of a small company affiliated with Pentagon. Spraying of it in a
form of an aerosol would indeed make a devastating blow at enemy's
demographic potential. A fraction of a milligram was enough to eliminate all
sensations normally coinciding with sex. Which, by itself, still remained
possible, but only as a form of physical labor, and fairly hard one at that,
a lot like washing, wringing or ironing. There was an idea to use "antisex"
to control the population growth in the third world but it was decided to be
risky.
How it came to a catastrophe of the world proportions is still unknown.
Was really the stock of "antisex" blown sky high because of a short circuit
and a fire and a tank of ether? Or was the fire started by competitors of
the three giants that divided the world market? Or maybe it was the work of
some subversive, ultra-conservative or religious organization? There is no
answer.
Having tired of wandering in the endless underground the old man sits
down on the smooth lap of the plastic Cleopatra (having pressed the "Stop"
button beforehand) and approaches in his memories, like to the edge of a
chasm, to the great crash of 1998. Consumers, all as one, rejected with
disgust the goods that flooded the market. What appealed just yesterday was
today like an ax to a tired logger, like a washing machine to a laundress.
Eternal, as it seemed, charms - biological spell of the human kind -
dissipated without a trace. From that point on the breast reminded only of
the fact that humans are mammals, legs - that man is an orthograde creature
and buttocks - that there's something to sit on. That's it! How lucky was
McLuen that he didn't live to see this disaster, he who restlessly
interpreted medieval castle and space rocket, jet engine, turbine, windmill,
salt-shaker, hat, relativity theory, parentheses in mathematical equations,
zeros and exclamation points as surrogates and symbols of that only act in
which existence manifests itself in its pure form.
Everything changed in mere hours. Human kind faced complete extinction.
It started with a market crash next to which the crisis of 1929 seemed like
child's play. First to go up in flames was Playboy publishing. Starving
workers of strip clubs jumped out the windows. Illustrated magazines, movie
studios, advertising firms, beauty salons all went down the tubes. Perfume
and cosmetics, then clothing manufacturers stalled. In 1999 there was 32
millions of unemployed in US.
What could appeal to the buyers now? Abdominal support, synthetic hump,
gray wig, shaking figures in wheelchairs for the disabled - the things that
didn't remind of the sexual effort, of that nightmare, that hard labor. Only
those guaranteed erotic immunity, meaning rest and peace. Because
governments, sensing the coming danger, declared the total emergency in the
name of saving of the human kind. The headlines screamed with appeals to
reason and a sense of duty, on TV the servant of every religion convinced