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

'This equipment's quite old,' the nurse said. 'I've asked for replacement units several times, but we don't seem to be very high on the priority lists.'
And there's a natural reluctance at Central to admit anything can wear out. Potter thought.
'Yes,' Potter said. 'Well, I daresay you'll get your replacements now.'
Did anyone else see her trip that switch? Potter wondered. He tried to remember where everyone in the room had been looking, worried that a Security monitor might've been watching her. If Security saw that, she's dead. Potter thought. And so am I.
'The technician's report on repairs will have to be part of the record on this case,' Svengaard said. 'I presume you'll- ' 'I'll see to it personally. Doctor,' she said, Turning away. Potter had the impression that he and the computer nurse had just carried on a silent conversation. He noted that the big screen was now a gray blank, the Durants no longer watching. Should I see them myself? he wondered. If they're part of the Underground, they could help. Something has to be done about the embryo. Safest to get it out of here entirely... but how?
'I'll take care of the tie-off details,' Svengaard said. He began checking the vat seals, life systems repeaters, dismantling the meson generator.
Someone has to see the parents. Potter thought. 'The parents'll be disappointed,' Svengaard said. 'They generally know why a specialist is called in... and probably got their hopes up.'
The door from the ready room opened to admit a man Potter recognized as an agent from Central Security. He was a moonfaced blond with features one tended to forget five minutes after leaving him. The man crossed the room to stand in front of Potter.
Is this the end for me? Potter wondered. He forced his voice into a steady casual tone, asked, 'What about the parents?'
'They're clean,' the agent said. 'No tricky devices - conversation normal... plenty of small talk, but normal.'
'No hint of the other things?' Potter asked. 'Any way they could've penetrated Security without instruments?'
'Impossible!' the man snorted.
'Doctor Svengaard believes the father's overly endowed with male protectiveness and the mother has too much maternalisms,' Potter said.
'The records show you shaped 'em,' the agent said.
'It's possible,' Potter said. 'Sometimes you have to concentrate on gross elements of the cut to save the embryo. Little things slip past.'
'Anything slip past on this one today?' the agent asked. 'I understand the tape's been erased... an accident.'
Does he suspect? Potter asked himself. The extent of his own involvement and personal danger threatened to overwhelm Potter. It took the greatest effort to maintain a casual tone.
'Anything's possible of course,' Potter said. He shrugged. 'But I don t think we have anything unusual here. We lost the Optishape in saving the embryo, but that happens. We can't win them all.'
'Should we flag the embryo's record?' the agent asked.
He's still fishing. Potter told himself. He said, 'Suit yourself. I'll have a verbal tape on the cut pretty soon - probably just as accurate as the visual one. You might wait and analyze that before you decide.'
'I'll do that,' the agent said.
Svengaard had the microscope off the vat now. Potter relaxed slightly. No one was going to take a casual, dangerous look at the embryo.
'I guess we brought you on a wild goose chase,' Potter said. 'Sorry about that, but they did insist on watching.'
'Better ten wild goose chases than one set of parents knowing too much,' the agent said. 'How was the tape erased?'
'Accident,' Potter said. 'Worn equipment. We'll have the technical report for you shortly.'
'Leave the worn equipment thing out of your report,' the agent said. 'I'll take that verbally. Allgood has to show every report to the Tuyere now.'
Potter permitted himself an understanding nod. 'Of course.' The men who worked out of Central knew about such things. One concealed personally disquieting items from the Optimen.
The agent glanced around the cutting room, said, 'Someday we won't have to use all this secrecy. Won't come any too soon for me.' He turned away.
Potter watched the retreating back, thinking how neatly the agent fitted into the demands of his profession. A superb cut with just one flaw - too neat a fit, too much cold logic, not enough imaginative curiosity and readiness to explore the avenues of chance.
If he'd pressed me, he'd have had me. Potter thought. He should've been more curious about the accident. But we tend to copy our masters - even in their blind spots.
Potter began to have more confidence of success in his impetuous venture. He turned back to help Svengaard with the final details, wondering. How do I know the agent's satisfied with my explanation. No feeling of disquiet accompanied the question. If know he's satisfied, but how do I know it? Potter asked himself.
He realized then that his mind had been absorbing correlated gene information - the inner workings of the cells and their exterior manifestations - for so many years that this weight of data had fused into a new level of understanding. He was reading the tiny betrayals in gene-type reactions.
I can read people!
It was a staggering realization. He looked around the room at the nurses helping with the tie-off. When his eyes found the computer nurse, he knew she had deliberately destroyed the record tape. He knew it.

four
LIZBETH and Harvey Durant walked hand in hand from the hospital after their interview with the Doctors Potter and Svengaard. They smiled and swung their clasped hands like children off on a picnic - which in a sense they were.
The morning's rain had been shut off and the clouds were being packed off to the east, toward the tall peaks that looked down on Seatac Megalopolis. The overhead sky showed a clear cerulean blue with a goblin sun riding high in it.
A mob of people in loose marching order was coming through the park across the way, obviously the exercise period for some factory team or labor group. Their uniformed sameness was broken by flashes of color - an orange scarf on a woman's head, a yellow sash across a man's chest, the scarlet of a fertility fetish dangling on a gold loop from a woman's ear. One man had equipped himself bright green shoes.
The pathetic attempts at individuality in a world of gene-stamped sameness stabbed through Lizbeth's defenses. She turned away lest the scene tear the smile from her lips, asked, 'Where'll we go?'
'Hmmm?' Harvey held her back, waiting on the walk for the group to pass.
Among the marchers, faces turned to stare enviously at Harvey and Lizbeth. All knew why the Durants were here. The hospital, a great pile of plasmeld behind them, the fact that they were man and woman together, the casual dress, the smiles - all said the Durants were on breeder-leave from their appointed labors.
Each individual in that mob hoped with a lost desperation for this same escape from the routine that bound them all. Viable gametes, breeder leave - it was the universal dream. Even the known Sterries hoped and patronized the breeder quacks and the manufacturers of doombah fetishes.
They have no pasts, Lizbeth thought, focusing abruptly on the common observation of the Folk philosophers. They're all people without pasts and only the hope for a future to Cling to. Somewhere our past was lost in an ocean of darkness. The Optimen and their gene surgeons have extinguished our past.
Even their own breeder-leave lost its special glow in the face of this. The Durants might not be constrained to leap up at the rising bell and hurry apart to their labors, but they were still people without a past... and their future might be lost in an instant. The child being formed in the hospital vat... in some small way it might still be part of them, but the surgeons had changed it. They had cut it off sharply from its past.
Lizbeth recalled her own parents, the feeling of estrangement from them, of differences which went deeper than blood.
They were only partly my parents, she thought. They knew it... and I knew it.
She felt the beginnings of estrangement from her own unformed son then, an emotion that colored present necessities. What's the use? she wondered. But she knew what the use was - to end forever all this amputation of pasts.
The last envious face passed. The mob became moving backs, bits of color. They turned a corner and were gone, cut off.
Is it a corner we've turned and no coming back? Lizbeth wondered.