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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - 2 B R 0 2 B, Ч.1

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

2 B R 0 2 B

Part 1

Everything was perfectly swell.

There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.

All diseases were conquered. So was old age.

Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.

The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million souls.

One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named Edward K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man waiting. Not many people were born a day any more.

Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling (уст. подросток, юноша) in a population whose average age was one hundred and twenty-nine.

X-rays (рентген) had revealed that his wife was going to have triplets. The children would be his first.

Young Wehling was hunched in his chair, his head in his hand. He was so rumpled, so still and colorless as to be virtually invisible. His camouflage was perfect, since the waiting room had a disorderly and demoralized air, too. Chairs and ashtrays had been moved away from the walls. The floor was paved with spattered dropcloths (чехлы для защиты от пыли).

The room was being redecorated. It was being redecorated as a memorial to a man who had volunteered to die.