"Gordon R. Dickson - The Forever Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

mit data, please."
He pressed the data key and the hgbt above it sprang into
being and glowed for nearly a full second before going dark
again. That, thought Jim, was a lot of data-at the high-speed
transmission at which such information was pumped into his
ship's computing center. That was one of the reasons the new
mind-units were evolved out of solid-state physics instead of


following up the development of the older, semianimate brain~
such as the one aboard the ancient La Chasse Gailerie. The
semianimate brains-living tissue in a nutrient solution-
could not accept the modern need for sudden high-speed
packing of sixteen hours' worth of data into the space of a
second or so.
Also, such living tissue had to be specially protected
against high accelerations, needed to be fed and trimmed-
and it died on you at the wrong times.
All the time Jim was turning this over with one part of his
mind, the other and larger part of his thinking process was

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driving the gloved fingers of his right hand. These moved over
a bank of one hundred and twenty small black buttons, ten
across and twelve down, like the stops on a piano-accordion,
and with the unthinking speed and skill of the trained operator,
he punched them, requesting information out of the body of
data just pumped into his ship's computing center, building up
from this a picture of the situation, and constructing a pattern
of action to be taken as a result.
Evoked by the intricate code set up by combinations of the
black buttons under his fingers, the ghost voice of the mind-
unit whispered in his ear in a code of words and numbers
hardly less intricate.
"...transmit destination area one~ighty ElI Wye, Lag
Sector L 4~ at point 12.5, 13.2, 64.5. Proceeding jumps 10
Eli Wyc, R inclination ~9 degrees Frontier midpoint. Opti-
mum jumps twelve, .03 error correctable on the first shift...',
He worked steadily. The picture began to emerge. It would
not be hard getting in. It was never hard to do that. They
could reach La Chasse Ga1~erie in twelve phase-shift trans-
missions or jumps across some hundred and eighty light-years
of distance, and locate her in the area where she should then t
be, within an hour or so. Then they could-theoretically at
least-surround her, lock on, and try to improve on the ten
light-years of jump it seemed was the practical limit of her
pilot's or her control center's computing possibilities.
With modern phase-shift drive, the problem was not the