"Dean Ing - Silent Thunder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

Thought we could have lunch, Ramsay found himself saying after mutual greetings.
Jesus, he couldn't just blurt this kind of thing out without preamble! I'm researching a
piece on the laser-boost cargo system ? that much was true enough? and wanted to tap
your head on the international relations angle.

Wintoon had done a CIA tour back in the sixties. An old family friend, Broeck Wintoon
had developed wisdom with his caution and he had more solid gold contacts than Bell
Labs. The familiar gravel-dry voice was vibrant as ever. The view of an unimpeachable,
low-tech source, Alan? I'm no engineer.

Ramsay agreed, chuckling, mat he needed something from a generalist with credibility,
and mentioned their last talk six months previous without referring to its substance.
Wintoon would realize instantly that the intelligence community was again, somehow,
part of the topic. Wintoon was booked for lunch, sorry, but would be in the Med School
library after that. Until cocktail time, the old fellow added. If you'd care to join me at my
club?

Booze breath is a no-no when I'm on deadline, Ramsay said lightly, though his own
deadline was very personal, promising to drop by the campus in midafternoon.

He put the phone down feeling better, then hurried to collect his materials for the nice
capades. Irv, the producer, would forgive anything but lack of preparation.

Ramsay's upcoming piece would deal with the fleet of laser-boosted pilotless cargo
vessels now in development in central California. Dubbed 'Highjump,' the system
featured a fleet of small orbital vehicles that would soon be delivering half-ton cargoes to
America's half-assembled space station on an hourly basis. A National Public Radio
feature had already hinted that, while Highjump's laser-boost was nonpolluting and
many times cheaper than chemical propulsion, it could also become the basis for an
orbital bombardment scheme.

Ramsay thought Highjump no more warlike than the Sov and Japanese spaceplanes, yet
he was far from any conclusions. That's what research and videotaped interviews were
for.

He fidgeted throughout the session with Irv, unable to concentrate, remembering the
letter in his jacket pocket. He carried the session off, though, with promises and
memocomp notes. One of those notes, on a line by itself, was simply BIO. As if he could
forget.

Despite the handy terminals, Ramsay went straight to the station's wall-length array of
file cabinets. NBN had found that some people simply worked better from paper than
from a screen, and let the obsolete file system remain. There, he found several updates
to the bio on Kalvin, Walter Franz, beginning with the Missouri primary back during the
eighties.

Instead of letting an aide do the photocopy work, Ramsay made inferior copies in Irv's
spare office using his pocket copier. The problem with pocket copiers was that they
either made reduced copies that only a kid could read without squinting, or they required
that your pocket be the size of an attache case. Ramsay chose to squint rather than carry