"Murder In The Solid State" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

"I'll give you a full report when I get home," David said, the sarcasm thick and grating in his voice. "You want pictures with that?"
She paused, her smile vanishing. "Are you OK, David?"
He shook his head. His throat had tightened, his eyes begun to sting. The depth of his own feeling came to him as a shock. His heart was full, as Bowser would say, of maggots.
"They chained me to a wall," he quavered. "They scanned my head with this . . . They thought I was a killer. They treated me like a killer."
Marian's forehead creased up with worry lines, her expression working oddly around guilt and contrition, two features that seemed utterly foreign to it. "I didn't mean to make fun of you," she said.
He just looked at her, puzzled and surprised.
"Well, I guess I did mean to, but I didn't mean it to be, um, mean, you know?" She went on, the words spilling from her mouth, faster and faster still. "After last night, I should know, you know, not to make fun when something's happened, but it's just how I am. I just joke about things. I just do."
"I know you do," David said, taken aback by this rare display from her.
It came to him suddenly that the Marian he knew, the Marian he loved with such exasperation, was a mask: a tough hide wrapped around some different, secret person. Almost simultaneously, he realized that the same could be said of him, could be said of any human who had ever lived. It was one of those moments, those rare, insightful moments when an eye seemed to open up in the side of his brain, taking in the view from an area he hadn't known was blank. He sensed the conference around him seething with people: tiny, misshapen creatures lurching around in suits of adult skin. And on the heels of that came an even stranger thought, a question: what sort of creature had dwelt inside Otto Vandegroot? Secret dreams, secret fears, guilty pleasures hidden away. What did you dream, Otto?
"You don't look so good," Marian fretted.
"No. No, it's been a long day." He made a show of checking his watch. "Listen; there's a presentation in a couple of minutes that I want to see. I just called so you wouldn't worry."
"Well, thanks," she said uncertainly. "You should call your parents, too."
"Yeah, I have, thanks. Bye. I love you."
He cut the connection without waiting for her reply.
A hand landed firmly on his shoulder.
"You! David Sanger, who let you out of prison?"
Reflexively, he lowered his shoulder, bent his knees and turned to face the owner of hand and voice. It was a woman, middle-aged and frumpy-looking. One of the Germans, one of Vandegroot's lesser confidantes. At this moment, David couldn't recall her name.
"Get your hand off me," he warned.
But the woman merely dug her fingers in deeper. "Murderer, did you escape from the police? Or perhaps they simply let you go. Did they give you back your filthy weapons?"
He grabbed the woman's hand and turned it, then adjusted his fingers and pushed. The elbow locked and the wrist bent back, and suddenly the German woman was crying out and leaning over, her fingers open and away from David's shoulder.
This was Wrist Twist Number One, a simple maneuver that David's Street Defense instructor had called "the most effective pain compliance measure you are ever likely to need." David had done it without thinking, moved as he might move to keep a door from closing, or a bottle from falling over. With a shift of balance he could throw the woman to her knees. Adding a sweep with his left hand, he could cause her permanent injury, dislocating her arm, tearing at the muscles and ligaments that held it in place.
He let go of her instead, staring down into her upturned face. Fear had replaced her righteousness; she had laid her hands upon a dangerous man, her expression said, a killer, and now she was at his mercy. Her wince as she straightened let David know she was expecting a blow, expecting him to ball his right hand and smash her with it, in the face, in the stomach, in some vulnerable and painful place. She held up an arm to ward him off.
David felt a little sick. He hadn't meant to hurt her, not even to scare her. He just wanted her not to touch him.
"The police are here," he said. "Go talk to them, if you want, but leave me alone. I haven't done anything to you."
"You," she said darkly, backing away. "People will know about you. I'll tell."
"Just leave me alone," David said again, and turned away.
She wouldn't, of course. No one would leave him alone this conference, would leave him alone at all, ever, until Big Otto's killer was found. The long, long weekend stretched out before him, daunting and demoralizing. He just wanted to talk shop, damn it. His MOCLTJ, his chain drive, his dissociated ideas bouncing loose through the insides of his skull. And the dissociated ideas bouncing around in other people's skulls, waiting for a trigger event to bring them alive. Nucleation, crystallization, the spontaneous self-assembly of complex systems-David had seen it happen a hundred times. Two people are talking and then, suddenly, there is a~ Grand Scheme where before there was nothing. Like a message from the future, telling you how things would be, how they would happen. Like a message from God. He checked his watch again: two minutes to Robin Fiske's presentation, which he damn well wanted to see. He hurried back to the lobby to collect Bowser and the others.

The lecture proved more interesting than David could have hoped. Robin Fiske's original concept, now almost five years old, had involved simplifying natural enzymes by stripping away their excess material and reproducing only the active sites, plus minimal molecular structure to hold it all together. The resulting assemblages looked like children's jacks, and were "switchable" only to the extent that one or two of the prongs were hinged and could, in the presence of negative ions, be induced to pop from one stable position to another. Very clever, but dependent on enormous search and optimization algorithms.to find enzyme pairs that (a) could be used together and (b) could be represented conveniently with a single molecule.
Vandegroot, of course, had put a stop to all that.
Some people collapse under pressure, while others harden and prosper. Fiske, it seemed, fell into the latter category. Her new design was controlled by flashes of colored light, a method that would infringe no existing patents, but that was the least of its charms. The new enzyme was a cube, eleven nanometers on a side, with sixteen extendable rods on each face. Like a sort of puzzle box, it seemed to David.
"Conservatively," Fiske said of her creation, her eyes twinkling in the light of the viewgraph projector, "we estimate this design can emulate over sixty thousand commercial and industrial enzymes."
The audience gasped. David's hand shot up.
"Yes?" Fiske called on him, seeing his raised arm in silhouette against the window blinds.
"How close are you to market?" David asked the question eagerly, almost demandingly. This was something he could use, something that represented a giant stride toward real, applications-oriented nanotech. This was something damn near everyone in the world could use.
"We're not sure," Fiske replied. "It's RHT at the moment, and while we think we can get that overturned, it's going to take time. I can possibly get you a sample in the next year or so."
"RHT?" David said. "Already?"
She nodded. RHT stood for "Recognized Hazardous Technology," a label that would hinder commercial use outside of tightly controlled, high-security laboratories. David doubted his own facilities would qualify.
"That's stupid," he whispered to Henry Chong beside him. "It's just an industrial chemical. Drain cleaner is hazardous. Bad weather is hazardous."
"Be quiet," Henry whispered back.
"You're missing the point," Bowser whispered from David's other side. "Technology is power. You can't go around just giving it to people. Not if you want to keep your own."
"Be quiet," Henry repeated, "or leave."
But it was moot; Fiske seemed to have finished her presentation. She answered questions for a few minutes, and then formally concluded by switching the viewgraph projector off. Several people rushed forward to speak with her, a uniformed policeman and a hotel security guard among them.
David watched the men flash a document at her, watched the other scientists melt away into the background, uneasy. Fiske frowned at this intrusion, and guilt stabbed at David's heart. She was no murderer-why had he given Puckett her name?
"So," Bowser said beside him, his eyes on Puckett and Fiske. "Looks like they're taking her up to see the big guy. How does it feel to be a stoolie?"
"Terrific," David muttered. "Come on; I don't want to watch this. Is the bar open? Let's go get a drink."
"Buddy, I thought you'd never ask." Bowser looked over at Henry. "Hyeon, are you coming?"
Henry looked blank for a moment, then shrugged, his lips parting to form a narrow and humorless smile. "Why not? After this day, I think we all could use one."

The evening went badly for David, eyes and whispers following him wherever he went. The situation worsened when Puckett rejoined them, having "interviewed" a dozen or so "suspects" and grown weary of his own ignorance.