"Card, Orson Scott - Worthing Chronicle 01 - Capital" - читать интересную книгу автора (Card Orson Scott)

"Not yet." George smiled wanly. "They all had cancer. They didn't want to be wakened until there was a cure."

"Somec." Vaughn laughed. "Some miracle drug!"

"It isn't funny," George said.

***

"You signed a contract," Dr. Tell insisted. "You can't publish without my consent."

George shook his head. "I can't publish scholarly papers. So if you won't let me take it to fellow scientists, I'll take it to the press. They'll print the story."

Tell glared; restrained himself from shouting; said, "You bastard. You would."

"It isn't enough just to stop authorizing it. The formula is public knowledge-- what's to stop some grad student from whipping it up in his lab for a friend? Even the life support isn't hard to arrange."

"You don't seem to understand." Slowly, carefully. The smile that had launched a thousand research projects made a struggle to appear on his face. It failed. "There is more at stake than somec."

George closed his eyes.

"There's a thing called independent research. We checked everything. We were so careful, George. We even did rat tests. Gave somec to some rats, not to others, and then taught them both mazes. There was no effect. How were we to know that somec impaired memory?"

"It doesn't impair, Dr. Tell. It eliminates."

"You don't know that."

"I'm pretty damn sure."

"Pretty damn isn't sure enough, George. There's that jackass of a senator who'll stand up and piously denounce federally funded projects that make basket cases out of people who already have problems. He'll do it, you know, and that'll mean funds cut off from everything."

"So what will you do, pretend everything's all right? They're not that far from curing some types of cancer now, and when they can fix it they'll wake up the sleepers who have that cancer and they'll find that they're vegetables."

"I don't know what we're going to do yet!" Dr. Tell shouted.

"We're going to warn the public."

"We're going to keep it quiet until we know what we're going to do."

"And when will that be?"

"I don't know."

George stood up. "I didn't think so. I know, Dr. Tell. It'd be nice to tell the press, there was a disaster, but this is how we're going to solve it in the future. But we can't do that, can we? So we're going to warn people, and warn them now, that somec does exactly what we've claimed it does, with one side effect. It wipes out memory."

"Dammit, George, we don't know that!"

"We suspect it. That's enough."

"If you do this, George, I can promise you that you'll never have a research or teaching job in the United States of America. Or Britain. Or anywhere!"