"Johnson, Annabel And Edgar - The Danger Quotient - uc" - читать интересную книгу автора (Johnson Annabel And Edgar)

the world is bathed in lethal ultraviolet rays. Raw sunlight
is a killer, and until someone can devise a way to re-create
our protective umbrella, we're stuck down here with our
dwindling ecosystem.

The only way we've stayed alive this long is through the
ingenuity of genetic engineers like Helmut Eddinger. New
strains of hydroponic fruit, long-grain wheat that heads out
in ten days, cows that produce tripletsЧhe's responsible
for all that- Including us, the superkids, concocted in the
test tube from the best available genetic materials to give

us extra brain power. Here in the laboratories of Key/Col-
orado, the world's greatest scientific complex, we're sup-
posed to outsmart doomsday and get our skimpy civilization
back up onto the surface again.

But fiddling cells isn't an exact art. You can string those
high-performance genes until the chromosomes look like
an overloaded charm braceletЧthere's no guarantee. I'm
a case in point. I looked all right when I was born, I had
all my hands and feet and I lived, which some didn't. I
made it through a lot of pressurized schooling, mainly be-
cause I've got a photographic memory. But when it comes
to restructuring the ozone layer, I haven't the first glimmer.
I can't even get my mind on it.

The truth is, I have a very distracting problem of my
own. According to the best extrapolations of the most so-
phisticated computer ever built, I am due to die in eight
months and fourteen days, give or take. If Pinocchio says
so, you can believe it. And the history is there. Eddinger's
first wunderkind lived to the age of .twenty-one before he
had a massive stroke. Number Two went geriatric even
faster, kidney failure at nineteen. K/CЧ3(SCI), the most
brilliant of the lot, bought it last year at age twenty-four,
heart attack.

t am now eighteen and aging fastЧinsomnia, low blood
pressure, iron deficiency due to undernourishment (food
loses me, I have to force every bite). From my last physical
checkup, the best guess is that f will develop pernicious
anemia. Which is why I can't seem to concentrate on ozone.
I know, I'm letting everybody down. Whenever Eddinger
looks at me, it's written all over him: What went wrong

with that one? When he finds out I've spent most of my Х
year building the refractor for my own personal experi-
mentation, he will emit spontaneous laser beams.