"Quantum Leap - Prelude" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

He let Sam handle the science; he did the public relations, the administrative work, the logistical scut work. Watching the budget, doing project planning, hiring clerical supportЧwell, some work did have its compensationsЧtracking the construction, making sure the commissary/cafeteria was stocked, taking deliveries of desktop computers and cinderblocks and making sure that necessary supplies were on hand when they were supposed to be so that work could continue uninterrupted.
Beneath them, the high desert was honeycombed with tunnels and caves, some of them already filled with laboratories,
offices, and living quarters. Deepest of all, so deep that no amount of heating could take the chill out of the pumped-in air, were Sam's office, lab, and the empty chambers. He hadn't told Al yet what was going into them, only that he needed them. Al shrugged and passed the specifications on. It was not for him to reason why.
Mostly, it was for him to do battle with the dragons. Sam wanted the setting in place before he started building his computer. It wasn't the easiest thing to convince the money men that all things came in their season, and Sam's season would come in good time.
"Did you review those cost projections I left with you yesterday?" Al asked.
Sam blinked.
"And I've got a sheaf of resumes for that administrative assistant job."
Sam blinked.
"Santa Claus is coming in for a landing at oh-five-hundred hours."
"It's not Christmas," Sam said at last. "He's not due for another eight months." His gaze shifted from middle distance to Al, and the corner of his mouth twitched, acknowledging the joke.
But a moment later, the nascent smile was gone. "Al, I want to look at those drawings for E wing again. We might want to have one of the geologists look at it, see if there's a problem."
"A problem? What kind of a problem?"
"I'm not sure. Those tunnels shouldn't cost so much; we seem to be rebuilding every time we turn around. Have you looked at the printouts since you got back?"
Al shook his head.
Sam got to his feet and stretched again, reaching up and almost brushing his fingertips against the ceiling. "Come on, let's go look."
Sam led Al over to the extra door, ignoring the glances from the engineers.
The extra door led into a featureless, empty room, about eight feet by ten. Al closed the door, and Sam bounced impatiently on the balls of his feet. "Down," he said.
The room dropped. Al was used to it by now; he almost expected small rooms to double as freight elevators. As usual, he had mentally reached a count of two hundred before the room floated to a stop.
The door unlatched, and Sam went steaming out again, Al trailing obediently in his wake. Sam headed for the construction offices, on the opposite side of the complex from the scientific labs.
Unlike the other, relatively monastic work areas, the construction offices bustled and hummed. The secretaries smiled as they came in. Even the lights seemed brighter. Potted plants provided unaccustomed color; the walls were covered with OSHA and EEO posters and extensive, detailed blueprints for electrical systems, plumbing, emergency access, sewage, power.
"Are you looking for Mr. Williams?" one draftsman asked, looking up from her computer. "He's in the back office with Tony and Ibrahim. No, they swapped offices last week, it's the one over there." She swiveled her chair around, almost knocking over the crutches propped against her table, and pointed the way through the maze of dividers.
Williams's office consisted of a small table pushed up against the wall to make room for the large table that dominated the middle of the room. Three men were leaning over a drawing. "If you reinforced it hereЧ" one was saying. Another nodded and sketched quickly with a red pen. He wasn't actually drawing on the blueprint, Al could see; a layer of clear plastic protected the original.
And it was a good thing, too, as a second man, dark-skinned and intense, argued, "No, no, if you do that you'll stress thisЧ" and rubbed out the red marks and replaced them with green ones. "See? It wouldn't work at all!"
Ed Williams looked up to see Sam and Al waiting. "Oh, thank God. I can chase these guys out and let them settle their fight somewhere else."
"I don't want to interrupt," Sam demurred. But Williams wasn't going to lose his chance. "Sam, you know Ibrahim ibn Abbas and Tony Weyland?"
"Of course." They shook hands. "What are you arguing about?"
Williams shot Sam a dirty look. "Something I wanted to get settled before it got to you, actually."
"Oops," Al muttered. "Delegate, Sam. You gotta delegate."
Sam shook his head, chagrined. "I take it back. I never saw anything, never heard anything, I just got here. Hello, Ed, how are you?" And he held out his hand to be shaken again..
Tony Weyland laughed out loud. Al glanced at him sharply. He was tall and yellow-haired, shaped rather like Humpty Dumpty with a large waist, no shoulders, and ridiculously tiny feet, and he had a jovial smile on his face. He ought to have physically dominated the shorter, slender ibn Abbas and the equally short, potbellied Williams, but instead he only looked awkward. He caught Al's look and flushed, stepping back.
"Just fine, Sam, and how's yourself?" Williams responded. "We were just finishing up here." He glared at his two subordinates. "What can I do for you?"
Sam paused, and the two junior engineers took the hint and headed for the door. "I wanted to look at the drawings for the E wing again. That's where we were overrunning, right?"
Williams grunted. "Funny you should mention that. It's been like pouring money down a rathole. No, Tony, I'll handle it," he said as Weyland stopped, obviously willing to rejoin them. "You get back to that second set of backups."
"I had Marti doing that."
"Then go check on Marti." Williams stared pointedly at the other man. Weyland backed out of the office. Al grunted to himself, filing the incident in mind. Probably just another young stud, trying to prove he was hot stuff.
"We were just looking at that," Williams said, indicating the blueprint on the table. Now, closer to, Al could see that it wasn't even a drawing. The table was actually a flat screen, and the drawing was projected onto it. The plastic over the top allowed them to make changes on the drawing without damaging the screen surface.
"Let me print this first. Watch your fingers," Williams
said. He pushed a button at the side of the table, and a metal plate slid over the surface, covering screen and plastic both. The table hummed. The plate slid back. Moments later a four-foot-wide curl of paper began feeding out the other end. Williams rolled it up and stacked it with other rolls in a corner. "Okay, what can I do for you?"
"I wanted to look at the plans and the cost projections for that wing," Sam said.
"Okay," Williams said agreeably. He pulled a keyboard out of the side of the table nearest him and typed in a command. The tabletop screen blinked. "You want the overview or details?"
"Just the overview."
The table blinked again. In a moment yet another drawing appeared, looking like nothing so much as a side view of an ant farm, with tunnels going in every direction. They'd used preexisting mine shafts and tunnels wherever possible in building the Project, and this part of the mountains was honeycombed with them. Next to the image a series of cost figures appeared. Sam and Ed Williams studied them silently. Al was still looking at the table, wondering if it would do the dishes too.
"We lost sixty million dollars in construction money," Sam said. "I hate to do this, but we may have to hold off on any more work there. The optical-fiber network has to have priority."
"What is E wing?" Al said, shifting his attention abruptly. Ed grimaced. "Hey, / can't remember every detail."
"It's where we were going to put the archives once we were up and running," Sam said absently. Al grimaced tooЧhe'd known that.
Sam was tracing one of the tunnels. The green marks ibn Abbas had made now showed up on the screen image, still rough. "What's this?"
"Oh, that's what the boys were arguing about," Williams said. "Tony's responsible for that section, and Ibrahim says he's got a design flaw. You know engineers. They love to change things."

"Well, I want to go down there and look at it, but I think we're going to shift the work away from there for a while. Make sure it's blocked off. We don't want anybody getting hurt."
Williams nodded. "There are only two ways in there right now, though of course if you tried to come in from the other direction, from outside, there's probably a hundred, with all those mining tunnels. They'll all be blocked off by the time we finish. You'll need hard hats; they're in the equipment lockers. Want me to come?"