"Dean Ing - Firefight Y2K" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

"Of course," she whispered, almost lovingly.

Some yards away, a tiny animal scrabbled in the leaves.

He thought at her:" . . . and so on, ad infinitum. I wonder what feeds on you . . ."




MILLENNIAL POSTSCRIPT
Very special variants of the human speciesтАФimmortals, telepaths, vampiresтАФare familiar themes in
fiction. With the real-world mapping of the human genome, our complete genetic blueprint, it's becoming
clear that we will eventually be able to engineer humans to order. The current debate rages as to whether
we should, and to many people eugenics is a Hitlerian word. Those people may win every debate, but
labwork isn't a debated issue in every lab. Someone will try to improve our species on the DNA level.
Count on it. Of course, "improve" is a word open to interpretation; someone might decide the ideal
zookeeper should resemble his charges, only more so.

Meanwhile, one of our major tools in locating specific genes is the comparison of the human genome to
the genome of, for one real example, the cat. This is largely because we share roughly sixty inherited
diseases with cats, and engineering a diabetes-free breed of cat is a big step toward eradicating diabetes
from humans.

In the previous story, the lovely lethal Barbara may have shared some genes with a very different critter.
You're invited to guess which one I had in mind.
A REPORT ON
ADVANCED SMALL ARMS
CONCEPTS
Anyone who attends a future armament brainstorming session can expect some surprises. For me, the
conference held at Battelle's Seattle center in January 1986 was no exception. One of my major surprises
came when they said I could write about it. After all, an advanced concepts workshop is where you sow
the seeds of preliminary designs. Odd as it may seem, these concepts aren't yet classified. You can
expect that to change when some of these wild and woolly small arms systems germinate into the
development stage.

Once upon a time it would've been a bit hifalutin to talk about small arms as "systems." No more! To
begin with, we have to expand our notions of what becomes part of a small arm. Is an infantryman's
fighting suit a small arms system? If in doubt, we said "yes." We began by accepting an advanced combat
rifle with caseless cartridges as a fact, no longer of special concern. Some of tomorrow's small arms will
have innards as complicated as, say, today's cruise missile. A lot of that complication will be backup
emergency subsystems; the armed services can't afford battle gear that works only part of the time. They
also know that a man can only lug so much hardware around, and that's why the U.S. ability to
miniaturize its systems gives us a big advantage over the Eastern Bloc. Would you believe jet engines
fired as rounds from a combat rifle? I'll get to those presently.

Our goal was to thrash out advanced concepts for the Army's Joint Services Small Arms Program
(JSSAP). Battelle chose men from a variety of fields: its own labs, Army R & D centers, Texas
University's railgun program, Los Alamos, Aberdeen, several other centers, and a few science fiction
authors. Why science fiction? Because we spend lots of time peering at high-tech horizons. Some of us