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

He turned on her, eyes blazing. "I know what a fucking crime scene is! Jesus!"
She took half a step back, startled.
"I'm sorry," he said. He cast a look around, and his tears started up fresh once again. "Use the lobby . . . use . . . Oh God, Marian, they even broke my phone."
She was at the doorway now, looking concerned and determined and unflappable. "Come with me," she commanded softly. "It's bad for you to stay here."
He couldn't think of a reply, or a reason to remain behind, so he went out into the hall with her. He carefully closed the door behind him, paused for a few moments to collect himself, and followed her down to the elevators.
"We'd better call Bowser, too," he said to her after she'd pressed the call button. "He loves an emergency. He loves a conspiracy. Maybe he'll know. . . what to do."
But what could be done? Bowser didn't have a magic wand he could wave to restore David's lab. Computer freak or no, Bowser couldn't recover data from tapes he didn't have. Five years' work. The nanoscale chain drive, intricate as a music box and smaller than the tiniest virus, was no more. MOCLU, the molecular caulk and lubricant that, unfortunately, jammed nanomachinery rather than oiling it, was no more. Even the propeller/motor he'd designed for his master's thesis, mostly cribbed from the flagellar motors of natural blue-green algae, was gone.
He thought of his off-site backups, a patchwork of optical drive dumps five or six months out-of-date, most likely incomplete. . . His stomach fluttered. What if those were gone, too? With them, and with enormous effort, he could probably reconstruct a good deal of what was lost. But without them . . . There would be nothing he could do, short of starting over again from scratch. Was such a thing even possible?
Marian said something to him as they boarded the elevator, something about how the police would be here soon and they would do something, make things better somehow. He nodded, not really listening, not planning to answer. What could he possibly have to say?
Soon they were in the lobby. The floor tiled with waxy-smelling blue linoleum, the bare cement walls hung with bulletin boards and framed posters: a DNA molecule, a monkishly illuminated copy of the periodic table, a map of the Schrodinger equation for the porbitals of an atom.
Marian found the phone, punched Mike Puckett's number into it. Waited, introduced herself when he answered, and then explained the situation. David heard the words "laboratory" and "sabotage" mentioned several times. He did not hear "backup tapes" or "chain drive" or "five years' work completely and utterly destroyed."
Puckett asked questions for a while, and Marian told him what she knew. This conversation ran down quickly, though, and Puckett soon asked to speak to David.
"I don't think he's in a speaking mood," Marian said, looking over her shoulder at David, sitting on the floor with his back to the cement wall.
"Let me talk to him anyway."
Frowning, she nodded, then turned and extended a hand to David as if to help him up. The gesture was courtly and fluid, like something from a play, something utterly incongruous with the mood of this night. David accepted her hand, stood with her help. Puckett's face looked startled on the telephone screen.
"Jesus, Sanger, you look like hell."
David nodded. "Yes, hell. That's a good word for it, I think."




CHAPTER NINE

The crime-scene technicians did their work slowly and meticulously, creeping through the wreckage with their rubber gloves and their tweezers, their fingerprint scanners and thermal imagers, and that wheeled sniffer that looked like an oversized vacuum cleaner. Two men moving slowly through the room, and one woman who scurried around looking at everything, speaking into a dictation recorder that was mounted to her wrist with something like a watch band.
A local police supervisor stood by, speaking with Special Agent Puckett on video cellular link. The picture phone looked fat and heavy in his hands.
A smoldering outrage coursed through David, burning away his grief. Even this helpful invasion felt like a rape, the officers' questions like glaring accusations. And there were a lot of questions: where had he been? When had he discovered the damage? Did he know anyone who might have a grudge against him?
"My only enemy is dead," he had told them, and referred them back to Puckett for the details. David couldn't stand talking to them, could barely stand even to look at them. It was all he could do to keep from throwing them bodily from his lab. But the police, of course, were not the real targets of his anger.
When first confronted with Big Otto's death, he'd been stunned that anyone might think him responsible for it. But now he knew better: murder was well within his capability. If the destroyer of his lab were here right now, David would crush the life from him with his bare hands, squeeze the bastard's neck until his fingers punched through the flesh to the red pulp beneath. He understood this as a matter of simple fact, as he understood the pull of Earth's gravity.
"You're not being fair." Bowser's voice drifted in from the hallway. He and Marian were having some sort of argument out there. "There's nothing inherently political about a police force. Society needs to enforce its laws somehow."
"But where do they get off questioning David?" asked Marian. "Stormtroopers! What does he need an alibi for? Nobody could believe he'd do something like this to himself, destroy his own work."
"They're supposed to be suspicious, budette; they're the police. You want to get mad, get mad at the city council."
"Republicans and Grays," she muttered.
Bowser snorted. "Humanitarians versus everyone else, right? That's how you see the world. Listen, budette, nobody can punish the innocent like a humane, statist social engineer with a lock on the police. The effect is random at the user level."
"You're full of shit," Marian said. "You always act like you know more than the rest of us, but where does all this privileged information come from? Huh? Name your source."
"Well hello, Professor," said Bowser. "What brings you here this evening?"
There was silence for a moment, and then a new voice. "Hello, Mr. Jones, Ms. Fouts. Special Agent Puckett called me; I. . . heard what happened."
Henry Chong? David looked to the doorway, saw his mentor there. They made eye contact, gaze locking into gaze, the subtle twitching of facial muscles sending high-bandwidth signals between them.
Henry: Look at all this damage! Are you all right?
David: No, of course I'm not. Just think how you would feel.
Henry: Your point is taken. I am so sorry for you, my pupil.
David: That doesn't help much.
Henry stepped forward, gingerly avoiding the broken glass on the floor. "David," he said.
"It's all gone " David explained flatly. "Every bit of it, five years. Please tell me you have my off-site backups."
Henry looked troubled. "I keep them in my filing cabinet at home. I couldn't find them, David. Nothing is missing; there is no damage. . . But I cannot find your tapes."
Somehow, this final, total outrage did not seem at all surprising. It seemed logical, almost anticlimactic. David simply grunted. "I really am sunk, then."
"I will do what I can to help you," Henry said. "I am so sorry."
"Yeah, well. Thanks." He'd been fidgeting with the cord from his broken telephone, but now he threw it down on the counter and looked away.
Henry cleared his throat. "David. It's understandable that you should be upset, but I see you are torturing yourself by watching this procedure. I see no point in that. Maybe you had better go home."
"I can't," David said. "I have to know who did this to me. I have to know why."
Henry's face darkened. "I should have been more clear: you are not helping anyone, least of all yourself. I am telling you now to leave. Let these people do their jobs."