"Hogan, James P - Every Child Is Born A Scientist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

Accompanied by the falling note of a barely audible electric whine, the Ford Cougar decelerated smoothly across the right-hand traffic lane and entered the exit slipway. Without consciously registering the bleeped warning from the driver's panel, Dr. Bradley Clifford felt the vehicle begin responding to his touch as it slipped from computer control to manual drive. The
slipway led into a shallow bend that took him round behind a low sandy rise, dotted with clumps of dried scrub and dusty desert thorn, and out of sight of the main highway.

The road ahead, rolling lazily into the hood of the Cougar, lay draped around the side of a barren, rock-strewn hill like a lizard sunbathing on a stone. In the shimmering haze beyond and to the right of the hill, the rugged red-brown bastions that flanked the valley of the Rio Grande stood row behind row in their ageless, immutable ranks, fading into layers of pale grays and blues that blended eventually with the sky on the distant horizon.

The road reached a high point about halfway up the shoulder o. the hill, and from there wound down the other side to commence its long, shallow descent into the mouth of the barren valley beyond, at the far end of which was situated the sprawling complex of the Advanced Communications Research Establishment. At this time of the morning, the sun shone from the far side of the Establishment, transforming the jumble of buildings, antenna towers, and radio dishes into stark silhouettes crouching menacingly in front of the black, shadowy cliffs that marked the head of the valley. From a distance, the sight always reminded Clifford of a sinister collection of gigantic mutant insects guarding the entrance to some dark and cavernous lair. The shapes seemed to symbolize the ultimate mutation of science-the harnessing of knowledge to unleash ever more potent forces of destruction upon a tormented world.

About a mile farther on and halfway down to the valley floor, he came to the checkpoint where the road passed through the outer perimeter fence of ACRE. A black Army sergeant, in shirtsleeves but armed and wearing a steel helmet, walked forward from the barrier as Clifford slowed to a halt beside a low column. Nodding his acknowledgment to the guard's perfunctory "'Morning," Clifford extracted the magnetically coded card from his pass folder, inserted it into a slot in the front of the box that surmounted the column, and handed the folder to the guard. Then he pressed the ball of his thumb against the glass plate located adjacent to the slot. A computer deep beneath ACRE's Administration Block scanned the data fed in at the checkpoint, checked it against the records contained in its files, and flashed the result back to another soldier who was seated in front of a display console inside the guardhouse. The sergeant returned the pass folder to Clifford's outstretched hand, cast a cursory glance around the inside of the vehicle, then stepped back and raised his arm. The Cougar moved through and the barrier dropped into place behind.

Fifteen minutes later, Clifford arrived at his office on the third floor of the Applied Studies Department of the Mathematics & Computer Services Building. On the average, he spent probably not more than two days a week at ACRE, preferring to work at home and use his Infonet terminal, which gave him access to the Establishment's data bank and computers. On this occasion he hadn't been in for eight days, but when he checked the list of messages on his desk terminal, he found nothing that was especially pressing; all the urgent calls had already been routed on to his home number and dealt with from there.

So no unexpected panics to worry about before his eleven-o'clock meeting.
No sooner had he thought it, when the chime sounded to announce an incoming call. He sighed and tapped a button to accept.
"Clifford."

The screen showed a momentary frenzy of color, which stabilized almost immediately into the features of a thin, pale-faced individual with thinning hair and a hawkish nose. He looked mean. Clifford groaned inwardly as he recognized the expression of righteous and pained indignation. It was Wilbur Thompson, Deputy to the Deputy Financial Controller of Mathcomps and self-appointed guardian of protocol, red tape, and all things subject to proper procedures.

"You might have told me." The voice, shrill with outrage, grated on Clifford's ears like a hacksaw on tungsten carbide. "There was absolutely no reason for you to keep quiet about it. II would have thought that the least somebody with my responsibilities could expect would be some kind of cooperation from you people. This kind of attitude doesn't help anybody at all."

"Told you what?"

"You know what. You requisitioned a whole list of category B equipment despite the fact that your section is way over budget on capital procurement for the quarter, and without an SP6 clearance. When I queried it, you let me go ahead and cancel without telling me you'd gotten a priority approval from Edwards. Now the whole thing's a mess and I've got everybody screaming down my throat. That's what."

"You didn't query it," Clifford corrected matter-of-factly. "You just told me I couldn't do it. Period."

"But.. . You let me cancel."

"You said you had no alternative. II took your word for it."

"You knew damn well there'd be an exception approval on file." Thompson's eyes were bulging as if he were about to become hysterical. "Why didn't you mention the fact, or give me an access reference to it? How was I supposed to know that the project director
had personally given it a priority 1 status? What are you trying to do, make me look like some kind of idiot or something?"

"You manage that okay without me."

"You listen to me, you smart-assed young bastard! D'you think this job isn't tough enough already without you playing dummy? There was no reason why I should have checked for an exception approval against that requisition. Now I'm being bawled out because the whole project's bottlenecked. What the hell made you think I'd want to check it out?"

"It's your job," Clifford said dryly, and cut off the screen.

He just had time to select some of the folders lying on his desk and to turn for the door, when the chime sounded again. He cursed aloud, turned back to the terminal, and pressed the Interrogate key to obtain a preview of the caller without closing the circuit that completed the two-way channel. As he had guessed, it was Thompson again. He looked apoplectic. Clifford released the key and sauntered out into the corridor. He collected coffee from the automat area, then proceeded on to one of the graphical presentation rooms which he had already reserved for the next two hours. Since the meeting demanded his presence at ACRE that day, he thought he might as well make the most of the opportunity presented to him.

An hour later Clifford was still sitting at the operator's console in the darkened room, frowning with concentration as he studied the array of multidimensional tensor equations that glowed at him from the opposite wall. The room was one of several specifically built to facilitate the manipulation and display of large volumes of graphical data from ACRE's computer complex. The wall that Clifford was looking at Was, in effect, one huge computer display screen. In levels deep below the building, the machines busied themselves with a thousand other tasks while Clifford pondered the subtle implications contained in the patterns of symbols. At length, he turned his head slightly to direct his words at the microphone grille set into the console, but without taking his eyes off the display, and spoke slowly and clearly.

"Save current screen; name file Delta Two. Retain screen modules one, two, and three; erase remainder. Rotate symmetric unit phi-zero-seven. Quantize derivative I-vector using isospin matrix function. Accept I-coefficients from keyboard two; output on screen in normalized orthogonal format."

He watched as the machine's interpretation of the commands appeared on one of the small auxiliary screens built into the console, nodded his approval, then tapped a rapid series of numerals into the keyboard.

"Continue."