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

"Your pupil has a sense of humor," Professor Yeagle said to Henry Chong. "Wherever did he get it? Not from you, I'd guess."
"I've tried to discourage the boy," said Chong, with a not-half-bad attempt at good cheer.
"Well," David admitted, "I was only partly joking. Everyone wants to be a gene-sequence programmer these days, when what we really need is ship-in-a-bottle types."
"Have you ever built a ship in a bottle?" Elaine Busey asked with a smile.
David nodded. "Yeah."
At age twelve he'd put the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria in an eyedropper. The following year he'd copied the Eiffel Tower in spidersilk, the whole structure less than a millimeter wide at the base, kept safe inside a tiny magnifier box of clear plastic. When he dropped the box and its lid popped off and the model vanished forever into his bedroom carpet, he had cried hysterically for two days, until the family doctor knocked him out with an adult-strength sedative cocktail.
Weeks of depression had followed and, deeply worried for him, David's father had finally offered to buy him a new tool for his hobby, any kind he wanted. Taking Dad at his word, David had asked for-and received!-a precision dual-probe scanning/tunneling microscope that cost as much as a car, and which was capable not only of imaging individual atoms, but of picking them up and moving them. From that day forward, the SPM had been the center of David's world.
When he'd finally gotten to college and linked up with others who shared his interest in very small things, he'd been shocked and disappointed to learn that their attitudes, for the most part, differed sharply from his own. "Why mess around with scanning probe microscopes when God gave us the ribosome? Why build up from individual atoms when you can design proteins that fold up into any shape you need?"
He remained shocked to this day. Had you asked the throngs of people in this room about the five most important inventions, most would certainly name the free-culture ribosome and the RNA sequencer/multiplier, and possibly the PanProteia VR modeling system. And that, by itself, said damn near everything that needed to be said about the current state of molecular fabrication research.
Fact was, proteins would fold up into messy squiggles that might or might not approximate some crude machine parts. OK for medicinal applications when you just needed something like a molecular cage or sieve or catcher's mitt, but for serious manipulation, for gears and levers and gripping appendages, they were useless. Fragile and floppy, they waited for even a mild fluctuation in temperature or contaminant levels to cross-link them into useless goop.
Real, classical machinery was commonplace these days on the micrometer scale, though in David's opinion it wasn't good for much. Cooling systems for computer chips, yes, and a few lumbering "microbots" that were little more than windup toys, too small to move a dust speck and far too large and clumsy to move an atom. Even David's childhood SPM had better motor control.
The microbots were also both too large and too small for most medical applications, sized just right, in fact, to provoke a massive immune response: tens of millions of antibodies, the body's own nanomechanical soldiers, swarming them, gluing and trapping them until the kidneys could flush them away with the rest of the garbage.
Building machinery on the nanoscale, a thousand times smaller than this ungainly microtech, was perhaps the most important thing the human race had ever attempted, and certainly by far the most difficult. Accommodation was necessary not only with the Newtonian laws, but with the voodoo of quantum mechanics and the plain orneriness of atomic chemistry as well. You couldn't image a work in progress, either, except by methods so indirect and so imprecise that you felt like a blind, groping mechanic with boxing gloves on.
Mere brilliance was not enough for a task like that. Not nearly enough. And yet brilliance seemed the most you could ask from most of the AMFRI membership, who were content to spend their lives playing origami with pond slime.
"You seem a little down, suddenly," Denzl Quick opined. "Nothing we've said, I hope." He chuckled a little.
David shook his head and forced a grin. "No, sir. Just thinking how badly the world needs saving."
"Ah," said Quick, "then you are Henry's student after all. Now, you've been talking to us for five minutes, and not a word about your court case. I'm sure we're all dying to hear about it, so come across."
David shuffled. "Well, sir, it wasn't a court case at all, fortunately for me. Vandegroot could have bankrupted me if he hadn't been so sure he was going to win. He's tightfisted, that man."
"Please forgive my pupil," Henry Chong said, putting a hand on David's shoulder and looking around at the Heavy Hitters in mock sorrow. His accent was terrible, as usual, but the words were spaced and clearly enunciated. "His education has crowded out his manners. Very unfortunate, considering his education."
Surprisingly, Henry chuckled. "Let me be fair: I think he remembers some original substance of our discipline, even if he has forgotten the details. Molecular fabrication is that way, for some students. For others it's the push and pull of a thousand tiny influences. Like warfare, eh? If you're so smart, David Sanger, we'll let you work out the ju of numerical techniques for yourself."
He made a light fist and mimed with it as if knocking on David's forehead. "The boy's head is like a rock. I warned him, repeatedly, not to get in Vandegroot's way. So many bodies on that field, I didn't want to be responsible for another. But does David Sanger listen to me? No, he does not."
"It was a binding arbitration, wasn't it?" Elaine Busey asked with a laugh.
"Yeah," David said. "ECS express, no appeal. Even 1 can afford that one. What I can't figure out is why everyone thought I was going to lose. I mean, Big Otto never actually invented anything."
And once again, David went silent, fearing he'd spoken too boldly. But again, the Heavy Hitters laughed.
And a good thing; had you asked David to name off the biggest obstacles to human progress, he would have said "Vandegroot" five times. David had little understanding and even less respect for Big Otto, who had slapped together Heavy Hitting inventions in what was, after all, rather an obvious configuration to produce the Vandegroot Molecular Sniffer. It bewildered David that in the process of this development, Vandegroot had been awarded a series of sweeping patents that gave him broad power over the molecular fabrication industry. The fact that he was Grayer than a district court judge might have had something to do with that.
Really, the road from lab to marketplace was long and arduous enough without Vandegroot and his lackeys crouching like buried mines beneath it. But crouch they did, and on occasion they would rise up to blast otherwise-promising inventions. Not merely block or delay them or subject them to stiff royalties, but literally blast them with subpoenas and infringement suits and restraining orders, literally remove them from the remotest possibility of manufacture by their developers or by anyone else.
It was one of the great ironies of the industry that the sniffer, one of its few commercial successes outside the
medical and pharmaceutical markets, was a device whose smallest version OSHA had labeled with the words: CAUTION: TWO-MAN CARRY. So much for nanotechnology. A universe of possibilities lurked behind the Otto Barrier, and yet the whole thing was a farce! Vandegroot was a talented administrator, and admittedly a deft hand at manufacturing shortcuts, but his contributions to the science extended no further than that. David and his lawyer had proved as much in the three days of the arbitration.
Certainly, though, the barrier remained. David could commercialize his latest research only so long as he didn't cross another Vandegroot patent, and God knew that was easy enough to do. But he'd swept a few mines off the field, at least, and hopefully other researchers would follow behind him in the fight to clear the path entirely.
"Are we boring you?" Robert G. Shatraw asked David, in a friendly but pointed tone. "You look like you're off in the ozone somewhere."
David smiled, shook his head, made a huffing sound of self-deprecation. "I really am sorry, Dr. Shatraw. Life's been very busy; I've got a lot on my mind. It's no excuse for rudeness, of course."
"We don't all go head-to-head with Big Otto," Elaine Busey admitted. "That's got to be a drain on your mental resources, I would think. It would certainly steal a lot of momentum from your work."
"Yeah." David's grin widened, and he nodded vigorously. "I swear that guy would patent dirt, and find some way to put a trademark on the name, so he could sue anybody that so much as mentioned it. He'd patent the carbon atom if he thought he could get away with it."
Elaine Busey's eyes flashed a warning.
"You know," said a gruff voice behind David. He turned and saw standing there, no more than fifteen feet away, the Sniffer King, the Duke of Search and Seizure, Big Otto Vandegroot himself. He wore his usual spider-silk tweeds, his usual greased-back hair and neatly sculpted beard. And his usual sneer, a little exaggerated tonight. In his fist he held a very tall glass filled with ice cubes and amber liquid.
"Otto," David said, nonplussed.
"You know, one thing about me," Vandegroot said, his voice oozing with derision, "is that I have excellent hearing."
Henry Chong held up a" hand, palm out toward Vandegroot in a placating gesture. "The boy was just-"
"You little vermin," Vandegroot said, ignoring Henry, brandishing his drink and taking a step toward David. "You haven't got a grain of respect. When you were potty training I was changing the world."
A surge of anger ran through David, tensing his muscles. He matched Vandegroot's sneer. "The sniffer? Oh yeah, that's been a real boon. Thank you very much."
"What the hell do you know, boy?" Vandegroot's face was bright red.
" 'Boy'? How very Gray of you. You know, two of my friends got mugged last year. Mugged bad, right on the U of Phil campus. Bare fists and a bad case of mean. Can a sniffer detect that, Otto?"
"You don't know a damn thing." He paused, shifted his balance. "You go ahead, boy, build your stupid nanoscale chain drive. We'll see if the world beats a path to your grotty little door."
Vandegroot turned as if to go. Then, seemingly as an afterthought, he looked down at the drink in his hand, dropped an elbow, cocked his arm back, and hurled the glass directly at David. Light from the chandeliers flashed off it as it flew, spinning scotch and ice cubes off in every direction.
Unthinkingly, David stepped back and turned aside, the standard "when in doubt" move they had taught him in Street Defense. Cold wetness splashed the front of his shirt, followed by a burning sensation, and then a slam of pain where the edge of the glass had caught him and bounced away.
"Hey!" he shouted, his mind completely at a loss to explain or react to this development.
"You cross my path again and I'll take you down," Vandegroot said in his hoarse and gravelly drawl. His eyes burned beneath slicks of hair that had fallen out of place.
David blinked, and then spoke mildly, with surprise and disdain: "You asshole. Don't throw things at me."
Otto Vandegroot's face reddened further, his scowl deepening to an expression of active rage. Suddenly, he moved his right arm horizontally, as if straightening his shirt cuff, then snapped the hand downward in a whiplike gesture. Then, somehow, he had an object in his fist, a little white rod about half an inch thick and five or six inches long. He turned his hand in a peculiar way. The rod made a clicking and scraping noise, and something sprang from the front of it, growing. In less than half a second the rod had snapped out to a length of three feet, with a narrow taper at the end. No, a sharp point at the end.
Something else was happening at the wide end of the device: it was puffing out, like a balloon-no, like an umbrella. A conical handguard had unfolded just in front of Vandegroot's fist, locking into place with a final snap. And all at once, David recognized what Vandegroot had in his hand: it was a "drop foil," the newest weapon of choice in the circles of the well-to-do.