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

CHAPTER FOUR

The walls of the police station were splashed, unsurprisingly, with campaign posters for the Gray Party, JOE MUGGER DOESN'T WANT YOU TO VOTE GRAY! one of them said. The picture, a watercolor, showed a seedy-looking character shrinking away from a pair of coplike figures, gray silhouettes that looked far more sinister than Joe Mugger himself. It had once been forbidden, David was pretty sure, for politicians to advertise in places like this, but lately the practice seemed common.
The floor here was brown linoleum, the walls paneled in cheap but tasteful falsewood. The desks were immaculate, a late-model computer terminal sitting atop every one. The lighting was bright and cheerful. Here and there sat obvious "perpetrators" of one sort or another, but they all sat quietly, their arresting officers speaking to them calmly across the desktops. Aside from that, and the fact that half the people in the room were wearing police uniforms, David might have taken the place for an insurance broker's office.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO GRAY TO VOTE GRAY, said another, unillustrated poster. And beside that one hung a portrait of Colonel The Honorable John Harrison Quince, U.S. chairman of the Gray Party, dressed up in a dichromatic Uncle Sam suit, white stars and stripes on a field of gray and darker gray. Quince held up a fist, as if in victory. The caption said: AMERICA, THE SOLID STATE.
At that, David allowed himself a chuckle despite the circumstances. Government people could be so stupid sometimes.
Once, long ago, "solid state" had been a term of praise in the electronics industry, denoting a system that had advanced beyond vacuum tubes and mechanical relay switches and such. However, thanks to the microtechnol-ogy David worked so hard to render obsolete, even the cheapest electronic and photonic devices these days had moving parts, microscale pumps and fans and motors without which they could not perform the miracles that were expected of them. These days, "solid state" was a term used by nanotechnology researchers to denote molecular machinery which, through poor design or rough handling, had ceased to function.
It was a very derisive phrase indeed, one that had provoked more than its share of heated arguments in the ivory towers of molecular fabrication. It was, in fact, precisely the phrase David would have chosen to describe the ail-too-vivid dream of Gray America. A friendly cop on every corner, a friendly line trace on every telecom wire, a friendly network of interlocking regulations so tight and so inflexible that society, moving in its slow-motion societal way, would smash to friendly pieces against it.
The Dems want to be your mommy, the joke went. The Reps want to be your daddy, and the Grays want to be your parole officer. Most people did not vote Gray, he knew, but a great many did allow their opinions to be swayed and their priorities edited by the Party's unceasing agitation. As with EarthFirst and the ACLU and the so-called Moral Majority, the Gray Party's influence was far out of proportion to its actual size. More to the detriment of society, he thought.
"Sit there," David's arresting officer said, nudging his shoulder and pointing to the chair beneath Colonel The Honorable John Harrison Quince's portrait.
"Can you take the handcuffs off?" David asked.
"No."
"I didn't do it, you know. I didn't kill him."
"That's fine," the detective said, giving him a little shove. "Right now you're going to sit down and give me your personal data, and then you're going to go down to an interrogation room and wait for the FBI."
"I'm due to speak at the AMFRI conference today," David protested, with a sudden stab of fear and anger and frustration. Interrogation room? They were actually going to take him, handcuffed, to something called an interrogation room? As if he needed to have bright lights shone in his face, to be kept awake all night while a tag team played good-cop/bad-cop games with his head? "I'm presenting two papers."
"Not anymore," the cop told him. He sat down across from David and eyed him coolly. "Can I have your full name, please?"
"Why do I even have to talk to you if the FBI is coming?" David asked stubbornly. "They'll just edge you off the case, won't they?"
The cop nodded. "Absolutely. I wouldn't have it any other way."
"Why are they even coming? Can't the local police handle a homicide?"
Now the cop cracked a genuine smile, the first David had seen from him. "Are you kidding? A big international conference like that? Whoever killed that guy-" and here he lowered his chin and peered sharply at David "-sure as hell crossed a few state lines to do it. And in two days the conference ends and everyone goes back where they came from." He laughed. "Yeah, that's a beaut. I'll give that one to the FBI any day."
"Oh," David said. So now he could add jurisdictional politics to his list of woes. Obviously, since he hadn't killed Otto Vandegroot, the cops would ask him a lot of questions, would interrogate him, but would eventually have to let him go. But if they were bickering with one another as well as interrogating him, it might be a very long day indeed.
The chair, a hard and angular frame of bare wood, was biting into him, already beginning to cut off his circulation. But he settled deeper into it nonetheless, determined to draw from it whatever comfort he could.
The door of the -interrogation room swung open, white light spilling in around it, mixing with the yellow incan-descents and the pale glow leaching from the two fist-sized windows in the wall behind David.
A man walked in. He was heavyish, baldish, hair gone salty with a dusting of pepper. He wore a yellow dress shirt with a pink-and-blue paisley necktie. A picture ID badge hung from the shirt pocket, the blue letters FBI prominent upon it. David couldn't quite make out the name.
"David Sanger?" the man asked, closing the door behind him without turning around. "I'm Special Agent Mike Puckett. I'll be handling this investigation." He leaned across the table, looked at David in an appraising but not overtly hostile manner. "Are you comfortable?"
"Oh, sure," David said nervously, jerking his chains, letting them jingle. His wrists had been joined together by a foot-long section of steel chain, and joined from there to a ring mounted on a bar that ran along the wall. Like a banister, like the bar along the wall of a dance studio, but shorter and lower down, and painted the same ugly blue-green as the rest of the wall. David had about three feet of mobility in one direction, and about half a foot in the other. And he could not quite cross his arms, or put his hands in his lap, so he let them dangle against the restraints in a way that made him feel he was dog-paddling through the air. He was not, in fact, comfortable.
"I'm sorry about the cuffs," Special Agent Mike Puckett said reasonably. "Standard procedure, I'm afraid, but hopefully we won't keep you in here too long. I just want to find out what happened."
David nodded. "And I'd like to tell you." His tone was a mix of low fear and righteous indignation. Not, he hoped, the quaver of a guilty man, but that of one wrongfully accused.
"Do you need to go to the bathroom? If so, it would be a good idea to get it done before we start."
"They took me about half an hour ago," David said.
"OK." Puckett nodded once. "Let's begin, then."
He pulled out a dictation recorder, one of the very new, very small ones that looked like a short stack of nickels, and set it down on the table between them, a couple of feet out of David's reach.
"You were at a conference," he prompted. "Tell me what that was all about."
David cleared his throat. "Well, sir, it's still going on. I have to go back there once you guys are through with me. I'm presenting a couple of papers."
"On nanotechnology?"
"Right," David said. "Well, generally we like to say 'molecular fabrication,' which is a more inclusive term.
AMFRI has influence over a number of small industries." He paused. "Uh, no pun intended."
The special agent looked blank for a moment, and then smiled suddenly and chuckled with polite appreciation. "Very good. So, you're the guy who puts the little fans on the computer chips."
"Uh, no, you're thinking of microtechnology. We work on a much smaller scale than that."
"Oh. Aha. Now tell me, David, what exactly does AMFRI stand for?"
"Association for Molecular Fabrication Research, International," David replied. "It's like a union. Well, not really, but in some ways it's worse than a union. If you want to do serious work in the field, you have to be a member, and that means you have to conform to the AMFRI Standards and Practices, which are pretty strict. We like to say, 'I AMFRI, therefore I am not free.' And believe me, if you want any hope of advancement or funding or anything, you'd better know how to rub elbows."
"And that's what you were doing last night?"
David nodded. "Yeah, more or less."
"What's the paper you were going to present? What was that all about?"
Were going to present? David didn't like the sound of that. "Uh, well, there were two of them. One was about MOCLU, which stands for 'molecular caulk and lubricant.' I invented it"-by accident!-"in the course of my other research. It doesn't do what it was supposed to, but it does have some interesting properties."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. It was supposed to act as a kind of axle grease for nanomachinery, and in fact on the microscale-uh, that's on the scale of those computer-chip cooling fans you mentioned-it's very slippery and yet also has good cohesion, which makes it easy to work with. Unfortunately, on the nanoscale it acts more like a glue than a lubricant. It wrecked a lot of equipment before I figured out what was going on."
"I see. And what was the other paper about?"
David smiled. He was in his element now, suddenly at ease with his interrogator. "That's my baby. I've worked out a procedure for building chain drives on the nanometer scale. Like a motorcycle chain, you know? Or a bicycle. Only much, much smaller, obviously. To date, my smallest design consists of only about ten thousand atoms."
Mike Puckett pursed his mouth, and looked as if he were trying not to look startled. "Ten thousand atoms? I thought... You're talking about something much smaller than a human cell, right?"