"Blish, James - To Pay the Piper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

"This process," Hamelin said besitantly, "it takes a long
time?"
"About six hours per subject, and we can handle only one
man at a time. That means that we can count on putting no
more than seven thousand troops into the field by the turn
of the century. Every one will have to be a highly trained
specialist, if we're to bring the war to a quick conclusion."
"Which means no civilians," Hamelin said. "I see. I'm
not entirely convinced, butby all means let's see how it's
done."
Once inside, the Under Secretary tried his best to look
everywhere at once. The room cut into the rock was roughly
two hundred feet high. Most of it was occupied by the bulk
of the Re-Education Monitor, a mechanism as tall as a fifteen-
story building, aad about a city block square. Guards watched
it on all sides, and the face of the machine swarmed with
technicians.
"Incredible," Hamelin murmured. "That enormous object
can process only one man at a time?"
'That's right," Mudgett said. "Luckily it doesn't have to
treat all the body cells directly. It works through the blood,
re-selfing the cells by means of small changes in the serum
chemistry."
"What kind of changes?"
"Well," Carson said, choosing each word carefully, "that's
more or less a graveyard secret, Mr. Secretary. We can tell
you this much: the machine uses a vast array of crystalline,
complex sugars which behave rather like the blood-group-
and-type proteins. They're fed into the serum in minute
amounts, under feedback control of second-by-second analysis
of the blood. The computations involved in deciding upon
the amount and the precise nature of each introduced chemical
are highly complex. Hence the size of the machine. It is,
in its major effect, an artificial kidney."
"I've seen artificial kidneys in the hospitals," Hamelin said,
frowning. "They're rather compact affairs."
"Because all they do is remove waste products from the
patient's blood, and restore the fluid and electrolyte balance.
Those are very minor renal functions in the higher mammals.
The organ's main duty is chemical control of immunity. If
Bumet and Fenner had known that back in 1949, when the
selfing theory was being formulated, we'd have had Re-
Education long before now."
"Most of the machine's size is due to the computation sec-
tion," Mudgett emphasized. "In the body, the brain stem
does those computations, as part of maintaining homeostasis.
But we can't reach the brain stem from outside; it's not under
conscious control. Once the body is re-selfed, it will retram
the thalamus where we can't." Suddenly, two swinging doors
at the base of the machine were pushed apart and a mobile