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

He could remember, in blurry fashion, both operating and being operated upon, when he should not be able to remember anything at all, any more than he could remember the attack that had put him in the hospital in the first place. And the double vision, double experience had to be an artifact of the injury and the anesthesia of the brain operation. You couldn't be in two places at once. Everybody knew that.
So how had Weasel Mikowski known to take that scrap of bone and put it in that particular culture medium and preserve it to begin with? Mikowski was one of those who knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that brain cells couldn't be made to reproduce.
Yet when Sam had finally made it to his feet and begun the process of recovery, staggering around the hospital in a barely decent robe with an IV tree trailing after him, the first place he'd gone was the Path lab. And there they were, a gray jelly-like cluster of cells that used to be inside his skull and now were outside, and more important, within reach.
And Mikowski didn't remember having sent them to the lab. He had no reason to. If they'd been cancerous, or suspicious, sure; but these were just scraps. Biological waste, a side effect of cleaning up an injury site. No reason in the world to save them.

Except, of course, they were exactly what Sam Beckett wanted and needed to marry to the design technology for a computer that existed, back in 1990, nowhere except in the sister cells still inside his skull.
He picked up the dish with the waldo clamps and tilted it gently back and forth, letting the pink medium slosh gently over the surface of the computer chip. He wondered just how much life the cells had. Were they looking back up at him, as he looked down at them? And if so, what were they thinking?
Nonsense. Sheer nonsense. Individual cells had no consciousness. Even a dozen weren't enough. It was the organization of multitudes of differentiating cells that gave rise to functioning organisms. Like, as it were, calling to like. Or at least to similar.
In which case the cells in the dish probably were calling to him, after all, in little cellish voices. And demanding an explanation, no doubt. "Sorry," he murmured. "You're going to have to figure things out for yourself. No cheating on this one, boys."
He put the dish back down again and peeled his hands out of the gloves, thinking. The cells combined with the diamond substrates of the chips would form the basis for the continuum set sieve. He had to keep the growth going, or he'd be left with nothing but a highly developed, exceedingly expensive state-of-the-art computer, maybe two hundred gigaFLOPs' worth, with a fifty-gig memory. He didn't want state-of-the-art; he wanted beyond art. He wanted a computer with true imagination. Nothing else could manipulate time.
But he needed more cells than the ones painfully saved here, and he wasn't going to be able to get them out of his own skull. He probably wasn't going to be able to crack anyone else's skull either. Which was, he hastened to remind himself, a very good thing, after all.
Sometimes science got the better of his good sense. He had to watch that tendency.
The headache was getting the better of him, too. He massaged his temples as he left the little laboratory, entered the office and collapsed into the office chair, pivoting back and forth.
The intercom buzzed. He reached out with one hand and slapped it blindly. "Yeah?"
"You pulling another all-nighter or are you coming to the party?" Al's voice was acerbic even through the static. "We're waiting for you."
"What party?" Sam mumbled.
"Birthday party. Mine. Remember?"
There was food, and music, of a sortЧsomeone was pounding away on the piano. It was still in tune, Al noted; Sam had taken up piano tuning as a hobby as soon as the thing arrived. Nobody, not even Al, would admit to having acquired that piano, and it had been in terrible shape to start with. It still sounded a little tinny, but only one person in the Project was likely to notice that, and he hadn't made his appearance yet.
Al was bedecked in a suit of forest green, with a darker green vest pinstriped in silver to match the silver of his shirt. It was vivid and extravagant and eyecatching and he liked it. And there was a table shoved up against the wall with a two-square-foot sheet cake and chips and dips and buffalo wings and cole slaw and cards and even some interesting-looking packages stacked around it, and people laughing and talking and dancing. Al Calavicci was in a state of sober blissЧa state in which he still had some problem believing, but he was the administrative director of this crew and he had to set an example. Besides, he didn't want Sam mad at him. He made a mental note to duck outside later for a cigarЧSam was strict about enforcing the no-smoking rule too.
It wasn't often that most of the people working on the Project were together all at the same time; they worked different shifts, on different phases of the Project, some on computer design, some on programming, some on construction, some on testing. So he didn't know everyone, but he was certainly looking forward to getting to know the new ones.
That redhead, for instance. Tall and lissome and with skin like alabaster, and the most intriguing designs on her fingernails. He wanted to get a closer look.
He wanted an excuse to hold her hand, actually. He was sure it was soft and warm and perfect. And he could tell from across the room that she had huge, baby-blue eyes. "In my sights," he muttered to himself cheerfully, and headed across the room.
Someone else was at the piano now, an even worse player than before. The player was shouted down, and the piano was replaced with a radio tuned to a country station in Santa Fe. Someone started a line dance and swept Al up in the midst of it, sweeping back and forth across the floor in raucous time. He was at the wrong end of the line from the redhead, but that was all right. The night was young.
There was no liquor at this party, at least not officially; government funding didn't run to such things. Al didn't much care. He didn't miss the liquor, oddly enough. Once upon a time, not too many years ago, he would have been blind drunk by this time, unable to walk, much less dance. The very first time he'd ever met Sam Beckett, in fact, he'd been drunk and in a rage, kicking a vending machine, breaking his toes and too blitzed to know it. Sam had hauled him off, calmed him down, sobered him up, and started on a campaign to dry him out. Now he could remember entire eveningsЧsometimes to his regret, but still, he could remember them.
He hoped Sam would tear himself away from the lab long enough to join them. Sam wasn't good at parties. He knew how to talk physics or medicine or archaeology, but Billy Ray Cyrus? Al thought not. Shame about that, really. What good was a Nobel Prize if you couldn't use it to impress the ladies? But Sam had spent his whole life accumulating degrees, one after the other, and doing research. He'd never taken the time to learn the fine points of social intercourse, so far as Al could see.
The song came to an end, to be replaced by local news, and the radio was turned down and the dancers scattered, mostly
back to the food and the punchbowl. Al sighted in again and determined on a flank attack.
Gooshie was moving up on the redhead's other flank. But Gooshie was notorious for his bad breath, and as a distraction, he failed to rate.
"Hi, I don't think I've seen you around here before," he said, holding out a cup of pink punch. "I'm Al Calavicci."
"Oh, wow," said the redhead. She had a breathy, high-pitched voice and baby blue eyes. "Are you, like, the Calavicci who runs things?"
She didn't sound particularly bright. Ah well. Sometimes that had its advantages. "The only one around. Ah, what's your name?"
"I'm Tina Martinez-O'Farrell," she responded, holding out her hand. "I'm, like, really pleased to meet you. Sincerely."
Al nearly dropped his glass of punch. He routinely reviewed the personnel flimsies of all major Project personnel, and he'd seen that name recently.
"Ah, Doctor Martinez-O'Farrell?"
"Oh yes. I'm new here. This is a really dreary place, isn't it? I mean, it's so far away from everything, and it's so dusty. .. ." She batted her augmented lashes at him. Al could have sworn he felt the breeze.
"Well, it's the desert. There's a lot of dust in the desert." Al was considering the implications of all this, and beginning to reconsider. Dumb targets were one thing, but he could feel his own brain cells dying in this conversation.
"You know, if it weren't for the chance to work with Dr. Beckett, and the shopping in Santa Fe, I wouldn't even have come out here," Tina confided earnestly. "He's designing a really really interesting computer, you know. He wants me to help build it."
In fact, the hiring package indicated that Tina Martinez-O'Farrell was supposed to be the chief architect for that computer. Al was having some trouble fitting the resume with the woman in front of him.
"Have you been to Santa Fe?" she was asking him now, "It's so, like, ethnic."
"Oh, yes," he assured her. "Many times."
Was this worth it or not? He couldn't decide. On the one hand, the woman was a ditz. Based on the conversation so far, she could change the entire category of dumb-blonde jokes to dumb-redhead jokes single-handed.
On the other handЧAl drew his head back, consideringly, to appreciate the view as Tina turned to greet someone else, her voice a reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe'sЧthat body was, wellЧhe could feel his mouth going dry, and his heartbeat accelerating. "Bingo," he muttered.
Just about that time Sam came in, through the front door rather than the elevator room. Hearing others greeting him by name, Tina spun around and stretched up on her toes, waving her arm in the air excitedly. The move gave Al a close-up view of her profile, and conclusively made up his mind for him. He thought he could hear himself panting as the redhead yodeled, "Yoo hoo! Dr. Beckett! It's me, Tina! I got here!"
There were tiny lines of strain around Sam's eyes, but he smiled and gave Tina a quick hug in hello. Al stared, dumbfounded, as the object of his attentions transformed herself before his very eyes into a scientist spewing forth a gabble of technospeak, punctuated at regular intervals with "you know" and "like" and "to die for" and "sincerely." She thrust the cup of punch back into Al's hands, the better to use her own to talk with.
Sam appeared to filter out the Valspeak and follow the essentials without effort, responding in kind, minus the vocal pauses, talking about power requirements and substrates and architecture. The two of them were migrating into a corner, Tina chopping at the air excitedly, when Al decided it was time to take control again.
"Hey, wait a minute," he protested. "I thought this was a party. No work allowed. So cut it out, you two."
The two of them paused to stare at him blankly.
"Like, excuse me?" Tina said, in her bewildered little-girl voice. "Did you, like, say something?"
Al opened his mouth to expostulate.
"Dr. Beckett, will you play for us?" someone interrupted from across the room.