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

"Did they release you, sir? Is your arm okay?"
Al glanced down at the white sling and forced himself not to shrug. "Yeah, it's fine. They just let me out. There should be a taxi any year now."
"Do you need a ride back to your hotel? I can take you." The offer was instant and without strings, an impulsive generosity Al had found in only a few people.
Being less generous himself, he was inclined to take advantage of the offer. "Sure," he said promptly. "God knows when a taxi will show up. I guess I still have a room."
"If you don't, the hotel will still have your things," the kid assured him. "I'm sure the cops or somebody let them know what happened."
"Speaking of the cops, are you okay?"
The blue eyes clouded, as if Ross were having trouble remembering. "Oh, sure," he said uncertainly. "They said I'd have to testify, but then Stenno pleaded guilty, so I guess that's it. Lisa wasn't even charged."
Lisa must have been the girl in the store, Al thought. When he'd walked by and seen the boy pointing the gun at Ross and the store owner, Lisa, Stephen Wales's daughter, had had a look of sheer horrified enlightenment on her face. Al had been willing to bet that she didn't really know what she was getting into. It was nice to know that she wasn't going to have to pay the price.
Ross led Al over to a red Blazer, and Al settled back with a sigh of relief. The arm was hurting more than he wanted to admit, and the interior of the car was an oven. The warmth felt great.
They were more than halfway to the hotel before the air conditioning kicked in. By that time the cool air felt great, too. Thunderheads were forming over the Sandia Mountains, but the rain wouldn't hit until later. Now, the heat was still shimmering off the asphalt, blurring the cars in front of them.
Ross left him in the vehicle, air conditioning running on high, while he checked with the front desk, without suggesting that Al didn't look quite ready to walk the dozen yards to the lobby. When he came back he had a key and Al's battered leather suitcase.
"They gave you a new room on the ground floor," he said. "The public relations lady was at the front desk. She was real- ly nice." His dark eyebrows were knotted, as if once again he I was trying to remember something. "I'll drive you around."
He not only drove Al around, he unlocked the door and carried the little black suitcase in. Al wondered if he was ; expecting a tip. But Ross only smiled awkwardly, waved, and then got back into the red Blazer and pulled away, leaving Al wondering what had caused him to change.
The hotel room was identical to the one he'd had before, decorated in Pueblo Deco, with an imitation R.C. Gorman print next to the bathroom and walls that were painted brown and orange, presumably to evoke thoughts of a desert sunset. The bedspread was gray and black and brown and cream, reminiscent of a Navajo rug; the carpet was standard hotel-room mustard yellow. Everything was faded out by years of dust and wear. He lay back carefully on the bed and stared up at the ceiling and wondered what he was supposed to do now. He could have a cigar, he supposed. They wouldn't let him smoke in the hospital.
He'd called Washington already. The final separation papers had been filed while he was in the hospital, and his office had postponed his last debriefings yet again. He'd asked for, and received, two more weeks of leave. He wasn't sure what he was going to do with them. But once they were gone, he'd be going back, finishing up the last bits of paperwork, getting ready to turn over his "command" of the current projects. His life was winding down. He wasn't sure what lay beyond retirement; the military had been his only home for too many years. Even when he was a POW, he'd been a member of the United States military, and he'd known exactly who he was. He hadn't always liked it, but he'd known. A few months from now, he wasn't sure what he'd be. He exhaled a stream of pungent smoke toward the ceiling.
He didn't want to go to any more encounter groups.
He was really, really tired of moving around from station to station, of having no home but military housing.
Maybe it was better than not having a home at all.
Maybe not.
There was always Ross's suggestion.
Well, why the hell not.
But he wasn't going to tell Sam about parading around with his shirt off, participating in a men's encounter group. With luck, Sam'd never find out. It was just too embarrassing.
He reached over, wincing as he stressed the injured arm, and picked up the phone.

cHAPTER
TWO

"Now, Dr. Beckett," the senator said, looking up from under beetling brows, "tell us again about how this idea of yours is going to pay off for this country." He leaned back in his leather executive chair, causing it to roll away from the cherrywood desk. The chair squeaked against the floor mat, and the senator swiveled back and forth, repeating the sound, smiling to himself.
Sam Beckett sighed and sat up to go into battle again. The other senator, a motherly type seated not quite behind the desk but definitely on her colleague's side of it, smiled in a non-motherly fashion. Sam failed to notice. He, unlike the senators, was seated in a straight, uncomfortable suppliants' chair, and as he opened his mouth he looked over his audience's shoulders at the glass-fronted bookcases. The glass was shining clean, evidence of recent dusting. He wondered sourly if the dusting hid the fact that no one in this office actually read the books behind the glass.
"It's essential research, first of all, Senator Bantham." Sam was repeating himself, and he knew as well as anybody that you couldn't make someone understand an explanation by simply repeating the same words over and over, as if repetition would make them magically understandable. But he had worked so hard on this presentation, and the image of the words on paper wouldn't leave his mind. He'd hoped they would sweep the committee away.
He hadn't expected to meet a snake and a... he didn't quite know what to make of Senator Judith Dreasney. There was no committee, no hearing. Just two senators and their aides. He wasn't even sure if this was legal or not. Committee meetings weren't usually held in private offices with rubber tree plantsЧfake rubber tree plants at thatЧin the corners. It was a very nice office, other than that, he admitted. Broadwood floors and heavy rugs and a very expensive desk set that must have set a few taxpayers back. It smelled of very stale cigar smoke, and he wondered if Bantham observed the rules about not smoking in government offices. Maybe he didn't think of it as a government office. Maybe he thought it was his office.
No computers, though. He wondered how the Senate got any work done without computers.
"Yes, Dr. Beckett?" Bantham prompted. "You were saying?"
Sam dragged himself wearily back to his argument. In order to do applied research, Senator, such as we were trying to do on Star Bright, you have to do the basic work first. That work may appear to have no relevance to the lay observer; it may even appear frivolous; but you can't ever get to a final product unless you have a complete foundation to build on."
"Oh, 1 see. Foundation. And empire for Dr. Beckett, no doubt?" Bantham slanted a glance at Dreasney, inviting her to share the joke. Dreasney, clearly not a science fiction aficionado, looked blankly back. Bantham snorted and turned back to Sam, letting a thick drawl color his words. He was just a good ol' boy, sure enough. "So you came in on Star Bright, decided it didn't have itself a good foundation, proposed to shut it down so you could go do something else?
"Now, I do respect your intelligence, Dr. Beckett. It's damned hard, I tell you, to ignore a Nobel Prize winner when he comes into my office, hat in hand, to ask for funding for a pet project." He paused to enjoy the look of incredulous irritation beginning to bloom on his visitor's face as the fact that he'd been insulted sank in. "But I've got to keep in mind the best interest of the American people," he went on. "This budget you've drawn up, well, Judith and I have gone over it, and it's just way too much money. What you're asking for here, why, do you have any idea how many children we could feed for that kind of money?"
Sam looked from Bantham to Dreasney and back again. The fading sunlight lit them unevenly, like a Lucifer and his shadow, and he wondered momentarily what he was going to be tempted to now. Sam Beckett as Dr. Faustus, perhaps?
"It's a shame that we can't find some kind of practical application," Judith, shadow, said. She was smiling again, uneven white teeth showing.
It was always this way, Sam thought. He'd been coming back to Washington from New Mexico at least once a week, every week, for almost a year now. Star Bright had been shut down because there were just too many things they didn't know, and Sam Beckett had been the one to say so. Then they'd asked him to put together a project proposal, given him just enough seed money to get started. Now they were reexamining the proposal. They were interested, all right. They just didn't want to pay for it.
'This is based on Hawkings's theories, isn't it?" Bantham mused. "So you could say, in a sense, that Hawkings did the basic research. You could take his work and ..."
"No, Senator. I don't want to mislead you," Sam said. "We're actually extending the scope of Hawkings's work. We're taking it into a whole new area, integrating it with Lotfi Zadeh's work in fuzzy logic ..."
"You say you can build a computer that can handle 'a greater level of complexity than heretofore achievable,' " Bantham interrupted, with the air of a man cutting to the chase. "We've got a dozen computers that can handle complex problems. Now if you had one that could handle the deficit, you might have something there." He chortled, would have dug an elbow into Dreasney's ribs if the woman had been close enough. She drew back an inch, not sharing his camaraderie.
"It's not just a matter of complexity," Sam said wearily.
"You've tried pitching this to the Energy Department, I assume," Bantham said. "They seem to be getting into weird stuff these days. Maybe they can find a weapons application, or something."
"I thought that would be Defense," Dreasney said thoughtfully, as if Sam weren't present.
"Nah. They only use the stuff. Energy does the research." Bantham set his elbows on the desk pad, swiveled his head around vulturelike to give his full attention to her.
"There's that new department," Dreasney suggested, unperturbed. "Nobody seems to have figured out what they do yet. And they're certainly interested in new projects. They might have some stray budget money they haven't committed yet."
"That's possible," Bantham agreed, picking up a pencil and tapping it against his teeth.
Sam closed his eyes. He'd have to go back and write up his proposal again and haunt somebody else's halls for financial support. And it was so simple, really. Just a matter of building a computer.
Not multitasking, not parallel processing. A computer with inspiration. A computer that could dream.