Harrison Harry Stalowy Szczur 3 Stalowy Szczur ocala Ĺwiat
Harry Houdini Miracle Mongers And Their Methods
Harrison Harry Narodziny stalowego szczura
Harrison Harry Planeta Smierci 03
Harry Harrison Deathworld 2
Edigey Jerzy Wycieczka ze Sztokholmu
Brenden Laila Hannah 01 Wybór
Rachel Morgan 4 A Fistfull of Charms
kubus fatalista i jego pan_1
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
"My father and my brother your Uncle Luigi, Gian-franco only have to shave
maybe once every other day," his mother said, so she didn't get it, either.
Gianfranco wondered how he'd ended up stuck with such totally normal parents.
It didn't seem fair, not when he prided himself on being strange.
"You'll have to tell that Silvio. He'll be happy for you," his father said.
"He looks like the kind who got high marks in school."
"Much good it did him," his mother said. "Here he is, scrounging off of family
instead of going out and finding work for himself."
"Si." His father nodded. "He doesn't go anywhere, does he? He couldn't stick
any closer to the Crosettis' flat if the
Security Police were wailing for him outside."
He was joking. Gianfranco understood that, but only after a split second of
something worse than alarm. He felt as if someone dropped a big icicle down
the back of his shirt. The laugh he managed sounded hollow in his own ears,
and his smile must have looked pasted on. But his parents didn't notice
anything wrong. Most of the time, they just saw what they expected to see.
He often got angry at them for not paying more attention to him. Every once in
a while, though, that was nothing but good luck.
He did mention his second honors at dinner, but only after his mother poked
him in the ribs three different times. "Yes, Annarita already told us," her
father said. "Good for you. Sooner or later, studying usually pays off.
Sometimes it's so much later that it hardly seems worth it at the time,
though. I can't say anything different."
A lot of families would have thrown Annarita's first honors back in the
Mazzillis' faces like a grenade. None of the
Croset-tis said a word. To listen to them, she might have earned ordinary
marks, not outstanding ones. In their own quiet way, they had style.
"Bravo, Gianfranco!" Eduardo "Cousin Silvio" said. "Good grades impress
people more than they should sometimes, but they do."
Is that true in his home timeline, too? Gianfranco wondered. Too bad if it is.
Because the home timeline was the source of the games and books and ideas he
liked so much, he thought everything about it should be perfect.
He got a chance to talk with Eduardo about that a couple of days later. "No,
no, no." Eduardo shook his head. "Don't idealize us. If you think you've found
paradise anywhere, you're bound to be wrong. That's one of the things that's
wrong with Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. The proletariat isn't made up of
nothing but saints, and capitalists aren't all devils."
Gianfranco felt a delicious thrill at hearing him say anything was wrong with
Page 71
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
the world's leading the world's only legal ideology. He supposed a priest
hearing clever talk of heresy might have felt the same way. Like any Communist
state, the Italian People's Republic glorified the workers. It said so,
loudly, whenever it got the chance especially on
May Day every year. But the apartments the proletariat lived in made
Gianfranco's seem a palace by comparison.
He knew hypocrisy when he saw and heard it. Some things, though, he didn't
know. Shyly, he asked, "What are capitalists like? Do they really think of
nothing but money? Do they really want to exploit their workers as much as
they can?"
"Some of them do think about nothing but money," Ed-uardo answered, which
disappointed him. "You need to think about money. And some of them would
exploit workers as much as they could. That's why you have taxes, so some of
the money capitalists make helps everybody. And that's why you have labor
unions and you have laws regulating what corporations can do. The idea isn't
to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. It's to keep the goose healthy
and get some of the gold."
"How do we get capitalists here, then?" Gianfranco found something else to
ask: "How do we do it without making the government crack down, the way it did
on you?"
"Good question. If there are no other good questions, class is dismissed,"
Eduardo said.
"Come on!" Gianfranco yelped.
"I don't know how you do that. Nobody in the home time-line knows. That's why
we were trying the shops. They didn't work or maybe they worked too well,"
Eduardo said. "However you do it, it'll have to be by stealth. That seems
plain."
"Stealth? What do you mean?"
"People will have to start buying and selling and investing without realizing
it's capitalism. You'd have to call it something else, something that sounds
properly Communist. Stakhanovite economic effort, maybe. The idea of
working harder than other people doesn't go away it just gets changed around."
"It sure does," Gianfranco said. "Stakhanovites aren't supposed to work for
themselves, though. They work for the state."
"But they can get rewarded for it," Eduardo said. "That's the point. If the
state thinks your work toward getting rich will help it, it won't get in the
way except states always get in the way some, because they're like that."
"Hang on." Gianfranco raised a warning hand. "A minute ago, you said states
needed laws to keep capitalists from exploiting workers. Now you say states
get in the way. You can't have it both ways."
"Sure you can why not?" Eduardo answered. "You need some laws, and ways to
enforce them. That's why there are states in the first place. Otherwise, the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
