"Broderick, Damien - The Dreaming (The Dreaming Dragons)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Broderick Damien)

'There's no point going in, all the gripping stuff is piped through this room. The big computer's at the centre of the dome under a mess of thermal insulation, but these word processing peripherals are the major output systems. Copies of everything are slaved immediately to permanent file in the US and Russian sectors, but the snoops don't have any executive capability.'
'I somehow imagined he used a blunt pencil.'
'He did at first, before we got this little number installed. Mouse can't be persuaded to punch a keyboard, which is a drag, but I guess for a kid with half a brain he's not doing too badly.'
A flatscreen visual display unit in the observation room was showing a line-by-line update on the boy's scribbling, transliterated on an adjacent screen into a legible font. With a jolt Bill saw that the characters were Cyrillic. A third display came alive as he watched, presenting lines of English that rolled up and off the screen. An operator suddenly grunted.
'My God,' Bill said, 'the child's a Slavophile.'
'Three days ago he gave us a piece of poetry in Urdu. It threw the computer into some confusion. Didn't worry Lowenthal, though, the dumb prick. He still attributed it to trick memory.'
'A computer program is doing the translation?'
'Right. See that board he's writing on? It's pressure sensitive -- digitises his efforts, and outputs a fair copy to the displays. Then the translating programs do their stuff, throwing preliminary English or Russian versions. If it's over their heads they call for human intervention. Which happens surprisingly rarely -- these Kurzweil programs are _good_. The Russians cream their jeans every time they see our hardware, and weep at the software.'
Bill had located the biomedical instrumentation, and was emitting little bleats of pleasure. A twelve-channel EEG fizzed in harmony with the electrical activity in Mouse's brain: right hemisphere pulses flat and fast, with no spindles, left hemisphere equally desynchronized and hardly more active. A Fourier wave analysis was displayed in a histogram below the individual channels, confirming an absence of OOBE alphoid waves. But the pseudo-beta pattern Bill recognised instantly from studies on the psychic Ingo Swann. Mouse _wasn't_ awake, but he wasn't dreaming either, and he had none of the slow, high-voltage theta or delta waves of coma or non-dreaming sleep.
'He's out of the body, I'd swear it,' Bill said, grinning with satisfaction. All the vital signs from autonomic sensors seemed completely normal: pulse a steady 70; basal skin resistance, from the thenar eminence of the left palm and the left forearm, at the expected level; respiration consistent with the modest effort involved in writing automatically, no GSR anomalies. It certainly wasn't the profile of an autistic youth under stress.
'Captain,' said one of the shadowed computer operators, 'I think you'd better take a look at this.' The other operator glanced up quickly. Bill peered at his insignia. A Russian. The man flicked a switch and began punching swiftly on his keyboard. Black computer script continued to flow upward across the display screens.
'Shit. Give me a hard copy.' Hugh Lapp leaned on the American soldier's shoulder, and took up the paper as it slithered from a printer. A buzzer sounded.
'We have a hold on the translation,' the American operator muttered. He ran a cursor across the screen. 'Looks like idiomatic material.'
'Here, let me in.' The man rose and Lapp slid into his moulded seat. He stared intently at the screen for a moment, keyed in an identifying header, and began hammering the input. The man at the adjacent terminal called a hard copy of his own and started to get out of his chair. Without looking up, the astronaut barked authoritatively in Russian. Undecided, the operator hesitated, nursing his pile of printout paper protectively. Again he stood up and began to push past Bill, who watched with a paralysing sense of foreboding Hugh came to his feet and blocked the door. He said something cold and definitive, keeping his hands at his sides. The operator shrugged and went back to his place. Hugh sat down and finished his task. The printer hushed, and gave him more paper.
'Judas priest.'
On the television monitors, Bill saw the autistic boy lean back from his panel, right arm dropping by his side. The soldier in the Cage looked up and murmured something. All the displays had gone blank. End of transmission.
'What is it?'
'Crisis time.'
A fierce red tell-tale lamp activated above the console, blinking twice a second. The astronaut took a slim plastic rectangle from his pocket, neater than a credit card. It went into a slot beside the terminal keys. One of the displays scrambled, cleared. A tattoo of man-machine communication. Hugh lifted a phone from its recessed rack. 'Lapp. Is the maser patched into High Roller? Mark.' Four fingers came down together, and keys locked.
'You're CIA, you furtive son of a bitch,' Bill said.
Lapp's breath came straight from the back of his throat. 'I'll never tell. Bill, you'd better clear out.'
'No way. The kid's the reason I'm here. You can't clam up now.'
'Sorry, buddy. Like your friend Lowenthal didn't say, there are some things man was not meant to know.'
A high, sweet voice said, 'Hubert Charles Lapp. Captain, USAF.' It came from a speaker in one of the monitors from the shielded cage. 'Operative Second Rank, active, National Security Agency, Fort Mead. Consider the document unclassified. Matthew, chapter eighteen, verse three: "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." It is advisable for Dr Bill delFord to read the Kukushkin diary extract.' Mouse turned, in the silence, and over his shoulder smiled with extraordinary innocence into the lens. 'For your information, computer operator Dimitri Dimitrovich Joravsky represents the Glavnoe Razvedyvatel'noe Upravlenle.'
Everyone remained stock still. Almost simultaneously, three telephones buzzed, and a coded format started jumping across Lapp's screen. The astronaut's grim appalling expression galvanised abruptly into a spectacular grin. He dumped the printout into Bill's hands, and made a little bow in the direction of the Russian.
'What the fuck, Bill, let's go with it. Read, read, enjoy. It's Doomsday evening and the kid wants you kept up to date. But don't try peddling it for mucho roubles to the Military Intelligence Directorate, I fear our friend from the Aquarium has an edge on the market.'
Suddenly Bill delFord wanted no part of it. He looked down with uneasiness at the computer translation.
'You'll have to forgive my poor rendering toward the end,' Hugh said. 'The original hung the computer, but I think I've captured the gist of it.' He showed his teeth to Joravsky, who sat motionless and tense. 'Well, Spetznaz, we seem to have caught you cheating. How much 17-Tg-M have your boys ferreted away downstairs? Or is the point more subtle?'
In excellent English, the Russian told him: 'Captain Lapp, I suggest we arrange a conference between our commanding officers.'
Bill stopped listening. The first page was a copy of Mouse's handwritten Russian: hard, angular, adult. It was followed by the amended computer translation. His trepidation vanished. Hungrily, he devoured the communication from the Vault.
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*8. Ekratkoye Complex*
*NOVEMBER 12*
Well, now that Nurse Kuenzli has at last brought me pen and paper, what am I to write?
It seems that my dogged habit of jotting down the day's doings in my journal has become something more than simple compulsive ritual. (That it has indeed become compulsive is an astonishing discovery, considering how painfully I had to force myself, those ten years ago, to maintain regular diary entries. Discovering how peremptory the habit has become shocks me somewhat -- as though in this respect as well I have become no more than an adjunct to one of my light-winking laboratory instruments.)
I am for the first time today mildly amused, if only at the minor paradox. What I began to write -- nullified indeed by these words themselves, even if they are negated in turn by the circular triviality of my theme -- was that the ritual of keeping current my pretentiously leather-bound journal has become so stereotyped I could not write without it.
These sheets of Project-issue memo paper were fetched by Nurse Kuenzli when finally my monotonous complaints wore down her professional insistence that I should rest. The small success left me cheated and frustrated. I sat up in bed staring at the stack of virgin paper, irritably thumbing the retractable pen, and elaborated spurious conjectures.
Well. That exigency, at least, seems to have resolved itself. Perhaps (hallelujah!) I am after all more than a machine. To be candid, I suppose I first began my journal in the hope of allaying that bourgeois fear. After fourteen years in the neon halls of Novosibirsk the human part of me was shrivelling away, despite the fashionable banalities I could spout arguing the creative identity of science and art. I needed to speak human truth to myself at least.
So much for the literary customs of the scientific animal. I am, frankly, indulging in the crassest diversionary tactics.
It is my belief that I am dying.
Why else would they have rushed me here? (I am unable even to give the place a name; Nurse Kuenzli adroitly skirts any direct answer to my question. 'The doctors will be here shortly to examine you, Academician Kukushkin.') It's the damnedest hospital I've ever seen. A hospital with comfortable beds? Perhaps that is one of the side benefits of working in the most grandiloquent Security operation since the Sputnik project.
(Perhaps I infringe Security in writing these notes. Surely not: the medical staff must have clearance at least as exalted as anyone on the Project. I was accompanied here by Aegis guards -- I presume there's one or more on duty outside my room right now. Would they have allowed me pen and paper, for that matter, if they were concerned about Security? No.)
My fears are doubtless without foundation. Apart from one extravagant vomiting episode shortly after today's anti-radiation shot, I have had no indication of illness.
My predominant sentiment is boredom.
That's my major complaint, and probably the explanation for my difficulty in starting today's notes. There's nothing to write about, except the unthinkable -- and I shan't encourage morbidity by going on about that.
The whole cursed tasteful place, I hope with the exception of Nurse Kuenzli, is, in short, intolerably tedious.
Writing about tedium is no less tedious. I shall lay down my pen and turn once more to the study of my navel.

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