"Herbert, Frank - The Eyes of Heisenberg" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

Potter nodded. On any embryo at all. he thought. The key's the a gmine flooding. I could duplicate that myself on the basis of Sven's description. Gods! We could make billions of Durant embryos! And every one of them self-viable!
He took a deep breath, dismayed by the realization that -with the record tape erased - his memory might be the only container of that entire operation and its implications. Sven-gaard and the computer nurse could have only part of it. They hadn't been in there, immersed in the heart of the cell.
A brilliant surgeon might deduce what had happened and be able to reproduce the operation from the partial records, but only if he were set the problem. Who would ever take up this problem? Not the Optimen. Not that dolt Svengaard.
The guide tugged at Potter's arm.
Potter looked down into that flat, chill-eyed face with its lack of genetic identification.
'We are observed,' the guide said in an oddly depersonalized tone. 'Listen to me very carefully. Your life depends on it.'
Potter shook his head, blinked. He felt removed from his own person, become only a set of senses to record this man's words and actions.
'You will go through that door ahead of us,' the guide said.
Potter turned, looked at the door. Two men carrying paper-wrapped parcels emerged from the alley in front of it, hurried around the square opposite them. The guide ignored them. Potter heard a babble of young voices growing louder in the alley. The guide ignored these, too.
'Inside that building, you will take the first door on your left,' he said. 'You will see a woman there operating a voicebox. You will say to her: 'My shoe pinches.' She will say: 'Everyone has troubles.' She will take care of you from there.'
Potter found his voice: 'What if... she's not there?'
Then go through the door behind her desk and out through the adjoining office into a rear hall. Turn left and go to the rear of the building. You will find there a man in a loader supervisor's uniform, striped gray and black. You will repeat the procedure with him.'
'What about you?' Potter asked.
'That is not your concern. Quickly, now!' The guide gave him a push.
Potter stumbled towards the door just as a woman in a teacher's uniform emerged from the alley leading a file of children between him and the bolt hole.
Potter's shocked senses took in the scene - children, all dressed in tight shorts that revealed their long flamingo legs. They were all around him suddenly and he was bulling his way through toward the door.
Behind him, someone screamed.
Potter lurched against the door, found the handle, looked back.
His guide had gone around to the opposite side of the fountain which concealed him now from the waist down, but what remained visible was enough to make Potter gasp and freeze. The man's chest was bare revealing a single milky white dome from which blazed a searing light.
Potter turned left, saw a line of men emerging from another alley to be crisped and burned down by that searing light. The children were shouting, crying, falling back into the alley from which they had emerged, but Potter ignored them, fascinated by this slaughter-machine which he'd thought was a human being.
One of the guide's arms lifted, pointed overhead. From the extended fingers, lancets of searing blue stabbed upward. Where the light terminated, aircars tumbled from the sky. The air all around had become an ozone-crackling inferno punctuated by explosions, screams, hoarse shouts.
Potter stood there watching, unable to move, forgetful of his instructions on the door or his hand upon the door's handle.
Return fire was coming now at the guide. His clothing shriveled, vanished in smoke to reveal an armored body with muscles that had to be plasmeld fibers. The ravening beams continued to blaze from his hands and chest.
Potter found he no longer could bear to watch. He wrenched the door open, stumbled through into the relative gloom of a yellow-walled foyer. He slammed the door behind him as an explosion rocked the building. The door rattled behind him.
On his left, a door was flung open. A tiny blue-eyed blonde woman stood there staring at him. Potter found himself oddly recognizing the markers of her genetic cut, reassured by the touch of humanity in these tiny betrayals. He could see the cabinet of a voicebox in the room behind her.
'My shoe pinches,' Potter said.
She gulped. 'Everyone has troubles.'
'I am Dr Potter,' he said. 'I think my escort has just been killed.'
She stepped aside, said, 'In here.'
Potter lurched past her into an office with lines of empty desk. His mind was a turmoil. He felt shaken to his roots by the implications of the violence he had just witnessed.
The woman took his arm, herded him toward another door. 'Through here,' she said. 'We'll have to go into the service tubes. That's the only way. They'll have this place surrounded in minutes.'
Potter stopped, figuratively dug in his heels. He hadn't counted on violence. He didn't know what he had expected, but not that.
'Where're we going?' he demanded. 'Why do you want me?'
'Don't you know?' she asked.
'He... never said.'
'Everything'U be explained,' she said. 'Hurry.'
'I don't move a millimeter until you tell me,' he said.
A raw street oath escaped her lips. She said, 'If I must I must. You're to implant the Durant embryo in its mother. It's the only way we can get it out of here.' In the mother?' 'In the ancient way,' she said. 'I know it's disgusting, but it's the only way. Now, hurry!' Potter allowed himself to be herded through the door.

eleven
IN the control center, their red Survey Globe, the Tuyere occupied the thrones on the pivoting triangle, reviewing data and reviewing data - correlating, deducing, commanding. The 120-degree scan of curved wall available to each of them flashed with data in numerous modes - pictorially in the spying screens, as probability function in mathematical read-outs, as depth-module decision analogues, as superiorinferior unit apportionments pictured in free-flowing pyramids, as visual reports reduced to cubed grids of binaries according to relative values, as motivational curves weighted for actionreaction and presented in flowing green lines...
In the upper quadrants, scanner eyes glittered to show how many of the Optimen were sitting in on the globe's activity -over a thousand this morning.
Calapine worried the prescription ring on her left thumb, felt the abortive hum of power in it as she twisted and slid it along her skin. She was restless, full of demands for which she could find no names. The duties of the globe were becoming repellent, her companions hateful. In here, time settled into more of a continuous blur without days or nights. Every companion she had ever known grew to be the same companion, merged, endlessly merged.
'Once more have I studied the protein synthesis tape on the Durant embryo,' Nourse said. He glanced at Calapine in the reflector beside his head, drummed the arm of his throne with fingers that moved back and forth, back and forth on the carved plasmeld.
'Something we've missed, something we've missed,' Calapine mocked. She looked at Schruille, caught him rubbing his hands along his robe at his thighs, a motion that seemed filled with stark betrayal of nervousness.
'Now it happens I've discovered the thing we missed,' Nourse said.
A movement of Schruille's head caught Nourse's attention. He turned. For a moment, they stared at each other in the prisms. Nourse found it interesting that Schruille betrayed a tiny skin blemish beside his nose.
Odd, Nourse thought. How could one of us have a blemish such as that? Surely there could be no emymic imbalance.
'Well, what is it?' Schruille demanded.
'You've a blemish beside your nose,' Nourse said.