"Alan Dean Foster- Instant With Loud Voices" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

Instant With Loud Voices
by Alan Dean Foster
How the devil was he going to tell Hank Strevelle that his life's work wouldn't work? As he hurried down
the brightly lit white corridor, Ken Jerome tried to compose the right words as well as himself.

The remote unit via which he'd run the final check hung loosely from his right hand. His lab coat fluttered
from his shoulders. The corridor was a football field of eggshell white, the remote unit a rectangular ball,
and he was running, running hard and uncertainly toward the wrong goal.

There was nothing wrong with the concept of the question. It was the figuring that troubled Jerome. That,
and the fact that no one knew if a machine could be mentally overstressed.

He'd spent a last hectic week reprocessing, rechecking. Wilson at MIT had confirmed his calculations,
but at this late stage even Wilson's prestige might not be enough to get the question aborted. He rounded
the last bend in the main corridor. The guard smiled as he held up a restraining hand. Jerome had to wait
impatiently while his identity tag was checked against the records. He was panting heavily. Forty-nine
unathletic years old, and it was a long time since he'd run this far with anything heavier than a new
equation.

The guard was smiling at him with maddening politeness. He Was a handsome young man, probably a
moonlighting theater arts student waiting for some visiting producer or director to stumble over his cleft
chin.

"Nice day, sir. You should slow down. You look a little flushed."

Wait till you hit the archaic side of forty, Jerome thought. But all he said as he retrieved his ident card
was, "I expect I do." The guard stood aside as the diminutive engineer hurried through the double doors.

Down another corridor, this one narrower and underpopulated. Through another check station, four glass
doors strong enough to have defeated Dillinger, and into The Room. The Room was the only one in the
building. It was the building. It had been built to house a single important entity and its attendants. Jerome
was one of the attendants. The entity was DISRAтАФDirect Information Systematic Retrieval and
Analysis.

The Room was a modest three stories high and roughly the length and width of a football field (I must be
going through male menopause, Jerome thought idly, to account for all these sports metaphors here
lately). As human constructions went, it was not especially awesome. Nor was the physical appearance
of DISRA overwhelming. What it represented was.

The flat sides of the three-story machine was transparent, allowing inspection of the exterior components.
Yellow and white monitoring lights winked on and off, giving the epidermis of the machine the aspect of a
captured night sky. They indicated to any knowledgeable onlooker that the computer was powered up
and working on only minor problems.

If a similar machine had been built back in the 1950's it would have covered most of North America and
still been inferior in capability to DISRA. Twenty years of effort, money and intelligence had gone into its
construction. Jerome had been involved with the project for the last ten of those years.

Each year new techniques, new knowledge, were acquired and immediately integrated into the design of
the machine. Its architect, Henry Strevelle, was no dogmatic, blind believer in his own omnipotence. He