"Sean McMullen - Pacing the Nightmare" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

My measurements showed that Melissa had learned to speed up her brain's visual refresh cycle at will,
so that she could effectively slow down her view of the world. She also had a reaction time of 0.014
seconds for the tests that I ran, a tenth that of a normal human. Karate can teach amazing skills, but
nothing like that.
All the while her karate continued to improve, sometimes dramatically. Once the sensei was
demonstrating some point about the structure of katas and asked six black belts to have a free-form
sparring bout with Melissa. Impossibly, she beat them all. The fight was exquisite karate, yet
heart-stopping excitement as well. Her technique was close to perfect yet she fought with ferocity and
tenacity. In return for skinned knuckles she inflicted a black eye, a cracked rib, a dislocated shoulder,
two bleeding noses, and another injury that made every male in the dojo wince. The sensei was
incredulous. The slight rigidity of Melissa's style had been replaced by a lithe, tigerish flow. How? The
answer would not occur to me for many months. Meantime, her brown belt was awarded early.
By now I was beginning to suspect that there was a link between Melissa's strange syndrome and her
in-vitro conception, but... manipulating genetic material in a fertilised human egg cell is difficult enough
today, so how much harder would it have been in 1992? Nevertheless, it was possible. Wonderful work
had been done back then, even with the crude techniques available. Was Melissa the result of an
experiment to breed an enhanced soldier?
If such an experiment had been carried out, it was certain to be a closely guarded secret. I explained
my suspicions to Melissa, and she agreed to help-- although without enthusiasm. It was as if she would
help out of loyalty to me, but for no other reason. This would not improve her karate, so it did not
interest her. For the next month I did some detailed research on the medical team that had conceived
Melissa, and I decided that my most promising suspect was Dr. Graham W. Corric.
Corric's rooms were in Birmingham, not far from the software company where my brother Alex
worked. I contacted Alex and gave him a false but plausible story. He also agreed to help. By the time
we took the train for Birmingham, Melissa's body was a caricature that clothing could no longer disguise,
yet she was eating more than me and blazing with energy.
***


Corric was in his mid-Forties, balding and carrying more weight than was healthy, yet he was sharp,
alert and perceptive. His manner was a little surly, but then I could allow a few foibles to someone who
had pioneered the first reliable molecular probe for the cells of higher vertebrates.
As with the nutritionist, we started with a demonstration. Melissa squared off and punched through
two boards that I held up for her. This confirmed that she was no ordinary teenage depressive. She then
stripped down to her underwear, revealing a body that might have belonged to a prisoner from Belsen.
Corric was gratifyingly unsettled. He responded by calling up files on his database computer, and he
spent some time studying them.
He was old fashioned about his computer equipment, as my investigations had shown. He used an old
networked ICL file server running an even older Unix operating system. The screen was not visible to
either Melissa or me as he logged on and typed commands. Finally he logged off and turned to face us.
"I've always had a bad opinion of all those Eastern martial arts," he stated baldly. "My cousin was into
karate when I was doing my early research. He used to go on about meditation and Zen, and the whole
thing sounded like metaphysical mindgames. He would sit naked under a waterfall in the Cotswalds in the
middle of winter to practice self-control, that sort of thing."
"Karate is karate," I replied.
"Explain."
"It's like sex. There's a lot of rubbish spoken about it, but you have to actually do it to know what all
the fuss is about."
"Have other students of yours become obsessed?"
"A few, but not like Melissa."