"Barbara Hambly - Windrose 1 - The Silent Tower" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

the sort of mousy little woman men never went out with, sealed like an anchoress in a
chapel with a pile of books, computers, and cats, but it was preferable to the struggle
between her conscientious efforts to please Gary, her boredom with watching TV in
his enormous, gray-upholstered party room, and her sneaky sense that she'd rather be
by herself, reading. It was not, she knew, the way she ought to act or feel about the
man who loved her. But shame her though it did, it was how she felt, despite all her
efforts to convince herself otherwise.
I must be hungrier than I thought, she reflected. They say low blood sugar can
make you depressedтАФthey didn't mention it could make you suicidal. With a sigh, she
began backup procedures, to save what she'd done for tomorrow. At this point, she
knew, she would make more errors through sheer exhaustion than she would correct.
She chucked the floppies on top of the general heap. Her co-workers never believed
her when she said that she located things in the heaps of printouts, programs, floppies,
data, reports, management bulletins, journals, and ads on her desk by the oil company
principle of geological stratification. They were all mystified by itтАФJoanna herself
would scarcely have been surprised to find trilobites in the bottom layer.
It was only when she stood up that she remembered the stealthy footfalls
outside her cubicle.
Don't be silly, she told herself again. San Serano is a security installation. The
idea that anyone could get in without being checked out by the guards is ridiculous.
But somehow, she felt unconvinced.
She patted the pockets of her faded jeans for her car keys, dug her purseтАФan
enormous accessory of Hopiweave and rabbit skins bulging with rolled-up printouts,
computer journals, and an incredible quantity of miscellaneous junkтАФout of the desk
drawer, and made a move to slip the hammer back into it. Then she hesitated. She'd
feel awfully silly if she met a guard or a co-workerтАФwhat co-worker's going to be
around at 2:00 a. m.?-walking down the corridor with a hammer in her hand. But still
...
You are twenty-six years old, she told herself sharply. The odds against your
meeting the boogieman in the corridors of the San Serano Bomb and Novelty Shop
are astronomical.
So were the odds against meeting a mocking and judgemental coworker, but she
compromised by sliding the hammer into her purse with the handle sticking out.
Then, soundlessly, she pushed open the cubicle door and stepped into the corridor.
Somehow, the bright lighting of the corridors made her uneasiness worse. The
doors of the other cubicles she passed and the typing bullpen were wells of eerie,
charcoal half-light, the machines all sleeping in unearthy silence. Corridors leading to
the test labs on the other side of the building made ominous echo tunnels which
picked up the padded swish-swish of Joanna's sneakers on the dark-blue carpet,
incredibly loud in that brilliantly lit silence. Once or twice she glimpsed the
industrialstrength cockroaches who lived in such numbers in the warm mazes of the
backs of the equipment in the test labs, but that was the only other life she saw.
Then light caught her eye.
She stopped. Not the even white illumination of the fluorescents . . .
Candlelight? No more than a finger-smudge of gold reflection against the metal
molding of the half-open door of the main computer room.
Fire? she thought, her pace quickening. The main computer room contained a
lot of printout bins. The mainframe, a Cray the size of a Cadillac, the biggest defense
computer west of Houston, could be tapped into by any of the desk stations, but there
was a lot of work in the computer room itself. There was no smoking in the room, but