"Fontana,.D.C.-.Questor.Tapes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fontana D C)

PROJECT QUESTOR
The Making of a Man
The android sat before the mirror in the cosmetology section, studying its own smooth hairless face and body. The table bore an array of dyes, creams, special heat-molding tools. An image flashed briefly in its brain-a picture of what it should look like. Then the image was gone. Gaps ... too many gaps in information. Program lacking.
The cosmetology computer keyboard was at the left. The android turned to it and activated it. A schematic came on as the screen glowed to life. The android studied it, keyed in a new instruction.
The computer completed the run and stopped. The android was motionless for the space of a minute, analyzing and correlating the information it had absorbed.
Then its eyes flicked down, and it picked up a heat-molding tool . . .
Also by D. C. Fontana Published by Ballantine Books:
THE WINDS OF SPACE
THE
Questor Tapes
D. C. Fontana
Based on the Television Pilot
Teleplay By Gene Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon
Story By Gene Roddenberry
ADeyReyBook BALLANTINE BOOKS NEW YORK
DEDICATION
For Gene L. Coon
June 7, 1924-July 8, 1973
"Gene celebrated life. With honesty, candor, love, generosity, humor-yet he delighted in .insisting he was a hard-nosed s.o.b. . . . He was an authentic war hero. . . . Yet he was very much against war and killing. So he built an armor around his gentle heart, of toughness and humor. . . . Any way you looked at Gene, you saw a loving man. He loved his family. . . . He loved people. He loved reading. He loved writing with a joy I've never seen in another writer. . . . Gene had a literary streak, and so I've adapted an old Latin verse by the poet Catullus, just for him, for now:
By ways unknown and many mem'ries sped,
Brother, to this moment am I come
That I may celebrate the dead
And speak of peace with your ashes dumb.
Accept my thoughts. Such heirlooms of past years
Are joyous'things to grace you where you dwell.
Take them, all drenched with a brother's tears.
And, Gene, my brother, now, bail . . . and farewell."
(Excerpted from eulogy by John I. Furia, Jr., President Writers Guild of America)
A Bel Key Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright й 1974 by Universal City Studios, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in ths United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Canada.
ISBN 0-345-28024-5
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition: October 1974 Second Printing: April 1979
First Canadian Printing: November 1974 Cover an by Dean Ellis
1
Jerry Robinson felt no more for the object lying on the instrument assembly pallet than he felt for any other computer assembly he had constructed in the past seven years. The fact that this computer had the shape of a male human being in every particular had little bearing on the work he did. He glanced up from a monitoring device to look at the object for which an entire top-security lab had been built.
It had an average build-about five feet eleven inches and not overly muscular. Still, heavy metal straps held the arms and legs in a spread-eagle position on the assembly pallet. Jerry could not think of it as anything other than it-the android Emil Vaslovik had left for a five-nation science combine to build. But the thick metal restraints had been insisted upon by Michaels, the British scientist.
"It resembles an ordinary human body," he had said. "But there is a tempered steel framework under that plastiskin and an energy source to give it power beyond all human capacity. If anything goes wrong hi the lab, I want to be assured it won't break loose."
So Michaels had been assured, and the android had been strapped down. Jerry saw no menace in the android. Perhaps he had worked on its component parts too long. To him it appeared to be only a man-shaped thing with sleek, hairless skin and no details at all to make it seem human. The bald head had basic nose and ear shapes in the proper places, but the mouth was only a slit-lipless. The eyes had been inserted, and the thin plastiskin eyelids were closed; but there were no brows or lashes. The body had no nipples or navel. Nowhere were there any of the
1
2
blemishes, scars, wrinkles, or other tiny flaws that human bodies carry.
Jerry thought ruefully of the long scar on his left shin, the result of a childhood bicycle accident. It could be covered, if he had enough vanity about it to go to a plastic surgeon and go through the skin grafts. One up for the android, he thought. Any scars it acquired could be neatly repaired in a matter of minutes with a heat molder.
Michaels' voice broke in on his thoughts. "Ready to disconnect?"
Jerry stepped closer to the android's side and scanned the contact points of the control and readout wires that led from the exposed circuitry to a telemetry unit overhead. The flap of plastiskin had been pulled back at the right side of the abdomen, laying open the intricate and astonishingly small servo-units, electronic relays, and microscopic transistors that would, supposedly, bring the android to life. There was doubt, in some quarters, that the project would succeed. Most of the android's components had been designed by Emil Vaslovik before he inexplicably vanished three years ago, and not one of the scientists or technicians in the room could explain what half of them were or how they worked. Or were supposed to work. The acid test would come in a few moments.
Satisfied that the contacts had been doing their job, Jerry nodded to Dr. Michaels. "Ready to disconnect, sir."
"Disconnect it from the lab controls."