"Robert A. Metzger - Quad-World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Metzger Robert)

Full Circle
CHAPTER 20
Next Day


To my family


I would like to acknowledge both Charlie Ryan and Richard Curtis who gave a new writer a chance, and
Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein who opened up a ten-year-old's imagination.


Prologue
Dummar Aircraft Co, Research Lab Malibu, California

July 10, 1990тАФTuesday, 8:29 A.M. Walnut Conference Room

Opening the conference room door and stepping in from the fluorescent brightness of the hallway, I
walked into the shadow-filled room. Running my hand along the wall I flicked on the lights and walked
directly over to the room's bay window. Perched high in the hills, the lab had an unbroken view of ten
miles of California coastline. Breakers rolled in, crashing against the sea wall that protected the
multi-million-dollar beach homes of the Malibu Colony. Far out beyond the white water, out where the
sea glimmered gold and orange, one lone surfer bobbed in the swell.

Ting ting...

I flicked off my watch's alarm and tossed the folder that had been tucked under my arm onto the
conference room's table. It slid several feet before coming to rest on the high-gloss lacquer surface. The
Silicon Integrated Circuits lab status meeting was permanently fixed in time and space: always held in the
Walnut Conference Room and always called for eight-thirty on a Tuesday morning. Same station, same
time, and unfortunately usually the same, meaningless problems discussed.

Sitting, I switched on the overhead projector that was sunk into the tabletop. Behind me, a projector
screen dropped from the ceiling and covered the bay window. I slipped my first transparency onto the
overhead, looked over my shoulder, and twiddled with the focus knob until I got some minimal level of
crispness. Leaning back in the Naugahyde chair, I propped my feet up onto the corner of the table. Since
I'd never been able to start the meeting before eight-forty, I had at least eight minutes to kill. I stared at
my feet.

My brown leather wingtips looked like shit. I'd bought them over three years ago when I had first gotten
this job, wore them every day to work, and had never bothered to shine themтАФnot once. Shining shoes
was a waste of time. It didn't get one more circuit pushed through the lab or a single line completed for a
Journal of Applied Physics paper. Normally I would not even waste the time considering the state of
my shoes, but they had degraded to such an extent that it was obvious that their days were numbered.
The fact that a great deal of the stitching no longer seemed to remain, and that my brown socks poked
through between leather uppers and plastic soles, implied that they were on the verge of total
disintegration. That mattered. My only other shoes were a pair of currently gray, but at one time white,
tennis shoes. If I wore those to work I'd offend the sensibilities of the three-piece-suit crowd. In the good
old days, before I had been put in charge of the Integrated Circuits lab, I would have simply considered
that an added bonus. But no longer. I had become politically astute. When I pitched a program to the