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

He shook himself. This wasn't the time or place for dark bloody thoughts of revenge on the surgeon, for Chrissake. Mikowski had done his best. He had to accept it. His sources said Sam was clinically dead for a while there, on that operating table, and Al wanted somebody to pay for that. But there was no sense in taking it out on the man who saved his life. Sam was getting better, Al could tell. Al checked on him, in between visits to the Washington police department to review the case file and harass old friends on the police force.
He still had business of his own to take care of while he was in Washington, tooЧsome trifling nonsense about finalizing a financial settlement, retiring from the Navy. It was going to take some time. But he added at least one more task to his personal agenda: If there was any way to find out what really happened to Sam Beckett, to make sure that it really was nothing more than a stupid and irrational incident, he was going to do it. He was owed some favors by people who were good at finding things out. He was going to try his best to collect.
Sam was awake most times, and could even talk a little, phrases and short sentences that left him white with exhaustion. The third time Al had come by, Sam wanted to know why he was in the hospital. He couldn't remember the attack. For a moment Al had panicked. Mikowski, standing at his elbow, tried to assure Al that it was normal to lose short-term memory after such a trauma, but it wasn't until Sam recited, slowly and with much effort, the relevant pages of the textbook at him that Al relaxedЧand he'd checked the book in Mikowski's office before he'd left the hospital to make sure. He'd be on the phone yet again to Sam's mother and sister in Hawaii, giving them daily updates on how he was doing. They were concerned, of course, but Al was trying his best to assuage their fears, convince them that the news media had exaggerated. Unless Sam was actually at death's door, he didn't think they'd come out to see him. It was a long way, after all, and Mrs. Beckett was in her seventies, and frail. And Katie would want to stay with her.
But if Sam's priorities had held him to his work when his own father died, it wasn't too surprising that now his mother and sister were reluctant to travel halfway around the world to be with him when Al was doing his level best to convince them that Sam was really just fine, it wasn't nearly as serious as it sounded, he was okay. ...
He would be, Al swore fiercely. He would be.
Sam seemed to think it was interesting not being able to remember something. Trust Sam Beckett to find something intellectually challenging about getting mugged....
But he should never have had to go through this mess to begin with. Al Calavicci didn't have so many friends in the world, either, that he could afford to lose one to as stupid and irrational an incident as this one. Nobody did. And he wasn't going to lose Sam Beckett, not now to a mugger, not ever, damn it.

CHAPTER
SIX

Judith Dreasney followed the reports on Sam Beckett's medical condition in the morning paper as they progressed, as the weeks passed, from front page to a small paragraph on the bottom of the last page of the local section. She drank i the news with her first cup of coffee, from "critical" in July to "guarded," then "stable" in August, to "expected to be released momentarily" as the Labor Day holiday came and went. Her aides learned to circle the updates and have the paper open to the appropriate page.
"It would be observed favorably," Yen Hsuieh-lung remarked to her during a meeting in the Senate Office Building one week before Sam Beckett's scheduled release, "if you were to provide tangible support to your belief that Dr. Beckett's faculties have been unimpaired."
Dreasney snorted. "What kind of 'tangible support' would that be?" she wanted to know. Every once in a while Yen Hsuieh-lung seemed to think he was Fu Manchu instead of a product of third-generation Chinese-American parents and an education at UC Berkeley and Stanford. It was extremely irritating.
"Dr. Beckett's proposal for the supercomputer, of course." Hsuieh-lung lit a cigarette, in defiance of the rules against smoking in government buildings, and smiled thinly through a veil of smoke. "You should support this."
"Dr. Beckett's proposal has been classified topmost secret, she retorted. "Nobody'd be able to observe my support, favorably or otherwise. It wouldn't exist."
"I would know," Hsuieh-lung pointed out. "And I have influence in certain ... quarters."
Dreasney stared at him. "Why? What are you getting out of this? I thought you hated his guts, ever since he killed off Star Bright."
Hsuieh-lung tilted his head back and gazed dreamily at the ceiling. "Ah, what I think of his guts does not matter. We disagreed profoundly about Star Bright, true. But what matters is his mind and what he can do with it, and I stand second to no man in my admiration for his mind. No one else can develop this computer."
"If it can be developed," the woman said, shoving aside a stack of summaries. "I think it's bull, myself. Cancer cells, or whatever it is, in computersЧridiculous."
His head tilted forward again. "Do you really think so, Senator? Do you have the background in medicine, in physics, in mathematics, in philosophy to begin to be able to make such a judgment? No one else in the world has the particular combination of disciplines to be able to visualize this concept. In fact, I would go so far as to say that to Dr. Beckett this may be a relatively trivial project."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Hsuieh-lung exhaled a stream of smoke directly into her face, causing her to sneeze.
"I mean," he said imperturbably, "that everything Sam Beckett has ever done, his life long, has built toward something. Something incredible. And I do not believe that inventing a new kind of computer is his final goal."
"So what do you think his final goal is?" she demanded, waving smoke away. "And why do you want me to support it?"
"I don't know," her visitor said at last, unwillingly. "But I am, shall we say ... most anxious ... to find out what, given sufficient resources, Sam Beckett is capable of.
"I don't think he knows himself. But whatever one man can discover, another can use. It has always been so, has it not?"
He smiled gently. Mysteriously.
After a moment she smiled too. You little slimy monster, she thought. You think you're good enough to take and use what John Beckett's boy can create? We'll see. We'll just see about that.

THE SUPERINTENDENT OF THE
UNITED STATES NAVAL OBSERVATORY
AND ITS STAFF AND CREW
REQUESTS THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY
AT THE RETIREMENT CEREMONY OF
REAR ADMIRAL
(ASTRONAUT)
ALBERT M. CALAVICCI
UNITED STATES NAVY

ON FRIDAY, THE SEVENTH OF SEPTEMBER
AT TEN O'CLOCK

CENTER COURT YARD, U.S. NAVAL OBSERVATORY
34TH AND MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE, N.W.
WASHINGTON, D.C.

R.S.V.P. UNIFORM:
CARD ENCLOSED FULL DRESS WHITE