"Geoffrey Landis - Ecopoiesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

crying.
"I don't even know why I'm still alive," she said. "Everybody else died."
I didn't know what to say to her, so I stroked her hair and said, "I know, I
know."
"Careful how you touch me, you idiot," she said, and her tone was back to
normal. "My whole face feels like it's on fire."
I knew so little about her. She never talked about herself; she so deftly
managed to always avoid the subject. She had always seemed so much in control.
But suddenly she was asleep, and the time for asking questions had passed.
#
I've heard that some people fall in love at first sight. It took me about three
classes.
The first one, I don't think I even noticed her in particular, just another face
among the many. I was teaching a class on troubleshooting. There are two
techniques to troubleshooting equipment. The first is, you know the equipment so
thoroughly that you have a sense of it, you know it as a friend, and when it's
down, you can feel what's wrong by pure instinct. That method is rather hard to
teach.
The other way is to be simple, thorough and logical; to home in on the problem
by pure mechanical elimination, a matter of dogged and willfully unimaginative
technique. That was the technique I was teaching. It means teaching how to be
methodical, how to structure a grid to let no combination of symptoms escape
detection.
The Institute has simple rules: everybody teaches, everybody learns. Every year,
during the Earth's northern-hemisphere summer, the Institute holds a month-long
convocation, and this year I was teaching. My class lasted only a week, and it
was almost half over before I really noticed Leah.
But, once I'd noticed her, I couldn't get her out of my mind. The breeze rustled
across pine needles, and I heard the sound of her voice, asking a question,
precise, cogent, perfectly phrased. I'd see the way she cocked her head,
listening. I became suddenly self-conscious, worried about how I presented the
material, whether it was clear and precise.
So, when I finished, I sat in on her course, although it was somewhat out of my
usual feeding range. Soliton-wave solutions of the Einstein field equations. I'm
slow; my lips move when I solve field equations in four dimensions. She was a
lot faster than the class, so smooth that it was obvious that she knew the
material so well she didn't even bother to review it before she started talking.

I knew that once the convocation had ended, I would never see her again. The
thought made me desperate, although I'd not spoken more than a half dozen words
to her beyond what was required of a student. I knew absolutely nothing of her
other than her name, Leah Hamakawa, and the obvious fact that she knew more
about general relativity than I would be able to learn in a lifetime. I had to
do something that would get her attention.
I invited her to come with me to visit old Los Angeles.
The month after the convocation is traditionally a time for vacation and
independent study, before we went back to our individual lives, hiring out as
Institute-bonded technicians or consultants or troubleshooters. I had no idea
whether she'd be interested in a trip to OLA; it was a wild shot to try to
impress her.