"Tom Maddox - Gravity's Angel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maddox Tom)

I lay watching the sky, my mind circling around the strangeness weтАЩd seen
earlier. I wanted to understand it all more clearly than I did, and I hoped that Dickie
Boy would be a help. In particular, he might know where her simulations had gone
wrong. They had to be wrong, or else . . .

I sipped at wine and wondered at the possibility that I was present at one of
those moments in physics that get embalmed and placed into the history books. I
suppose I was still wondering when I fell asleep.

I was jerked awake some time later by a noise like high wind through metal
trees. Amber flashes of light came from the side of the house, and a piano-shaped
machine rolled out on clear plastic treads, ripping chunks of sod with its aerating
spikes as it came. The machine was a John Deere тАЬYardman,тАЭ apparently run amok.

I went into the house and called Grounds and Maintenance. A few minutes
later a truck pulled up, and a man in dark blue overalls got out and called the robot
to him with a red-lighted control wand, then cracked an access hatch in its side.
Optic fibers bloomed in the robotтАЩs interior like phosphores-cent alien plants.

****

I awoke around eight-thirty the next morning. Carol Hendrix was still in bed; I let her
sleep. I left a message on DiehlтАЩs machine asking for a few minutes
person-to-person, then I drank coffee and worked again through her Monte Carlos:
lovely work, plausible and elegant, but almost certainly not enough to move Diehl.
How could it? As she had said, he wouldnтАЩt understand it.

However, I knew who would. In the event that Dickie Boy vetted her
simulations, weтАЩd take them to the Thursday Group that evening. We met weekly at
AllensonтАЩs house. Every important work-group at the lab was represented, and every
significant problem the groups worked on was dis-cussed there. Thursday Group
was the locus of oral tradition, the place where the labтАЩs work was revealed and its
meaning decided upon. By the time experimental results saw print, they were old
news to anyone who had been to Thursday Group. Usually there were ten or so
people there, all men, most in their mid-thirties, most of them white and the rest
Chinese.

Mid-morning she came in, wearing old LeviтАЩs and a black tank top. тАЬAny
news?тАЭ she asked, and I told her no. She got a cup of coffee and sat next to me and
watched as her simulations played.

Shortly after noon a message popped up in a window on the screen: тАЬIf you
want to talk, meet me in section 27 within the next hour. Diehl.тАЭ

тАЬDo you want me to come along?тАЭ she asked, and I said, тАЬNo way. HeтАЩs a
tricky bastard to handle at the best of times.тАЭ I left her sitting at the console, starting
the Monte Carlos up again.

I rode the Invisible Bicycle to the shuttle station at Maingate and locked it in