"Julian May - Diamond Mask" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

of galaxy-wide cerebroenergetic research projects. Having no physical voice, the monster activated
the input microphone by means of psychokinesis. It had learned this trick, and certain others, by
observing Jack the Bodiless. In an encrypted delete-protected volume tagged RESTRICTED ACCESS: BY
ORDER OF HUMAN MAGISTRATUM was an updated pr├йcis of the research being done at Edinburgh by Robert
and Viola Strachan and Rowan Grant.
Fury studied this data with mounting dismay. Damn them! They were moving in the very
direction it had feared. The monster cursed the circumstances that had prevented it from checking
out the update sooner. If the Scottish workers managed to publish their findings, there was a good
chance that Marc's dicey E15 cerebroenergetic project would be shut down in the ensuing uproar
over operator safety.
That would have to be prevented.
Erasing the dangerous data files and replacing them with innocuous material would be easy.
Ensuring that the three Scots did not discover the fiddle and raise a flaming row was more
difficultтАФbut Fury already had a notion how the problem might be resolved.
First, however, a brief check on the E15's progress.
Eliminating all trace of its illicit access to Denis Remillard's computer, Fury gave the
professor a final glance of contempt and then abolished its presence in the administration
building. It reappeared an instant later on the second floor of the CE lab. There, inside a
chamber crowded with workbenches and racks of apparatus, two scientists were totally absorbed in
their work.
The elder was a very tall, powerfully built man twenty-four years of age. His name was Marc
Remillard and he was the grandson of the eminent Denis. In addition to holding the Marie-Madeleine
Fabr├й Chair of Cerebroenergetic Research at Dartmouth College, he was conditionally acknowledged
to have the most powerful farsensory, metacoercive, and metacreative faculties in the Human
Polity. He had just been nominated a Grand Master and Magnate of the Galactic Concilium. His
acceptance, as well as the affirmation of his mental status, was still pending.
Fury had yet to decide whether Marc was a true antagonist or a potential ally in its grand


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scheme.
The enigma sat now at the console of a late-model Xiang analytical micromanipulator, intent
upon the holographic display. The command headset of the machine was nearly buried in his untidy
black curly hair, and its two short, hornlike antennae projected vertically above his temples,
giving him an uncanny resemblance to a young Mephistopheles. His eyes were the luminous gray of
brushed steel, set deeply in shadowed orbits, and his brows had a winglike shape, being narrowest
just above the distinctive aquiline nose that characterized so many members of the Remillard
family. Marc wore a faded green twill shirt over a white cotton turtleneck, a pair of tattered
Levi's, and muddy Gokey chukka boots. Caught at the edge of one pocket flap by its barbless hook
was a tiny artificial fly that Fury recognized as a Number 18 Black Gnat.
Marc's unofficial colleague, also dressed in grubby outdoor clothing and perched on a high
stool, was a ten-year-old boy. From time to time he attempted to explain to his elder brother what
he was doing wrong, only to be sedulously ignored. Jon Remillard was a child prodigy, a
prochronistic mutant whose intellect was arguably the most powerful of any entity in the Galactic
MilieuтАФalways excepting members of the ineffable Lylmik race. Marc and the other members of the
Remillard family vacillated between regarding the boy as a potential saint or a world-class pain
in the ass. To Fury the wretched child was the Great Enemy who would have to be destroyed
eventually, no matter what the cost.