"Richard Powers - Galatea 22" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

remaining hours in good faith. A page and a half freed me to go and do as I liked.
 Mostly, I liked to haunt the Center after hours. At night, the build-ing thinned almost to empty. The
community of night research emitted a sober thrill. The handful of sallow, animated faces at that hour
could not help but be there. Their inquiries had them hooked, as levered to the intermittent payoffs as
their lab animals. They piloted the halls, feverish, close to breakthrough, indifferent to clock time. They
weaved from lab to lab in directed distraction, eyes combing every visual field but the corridors down
which they moved.
Except for these addicts of the verifiable, I had the place to myself. That alone was worth coming in
for: fifty million dollars of real estate filled with several hundred million in instruments, boxes that glowed
with subdued purpose, abandoned like an electronic Rapture. No one could have a more profound sense
of history than a night custodian of such a building.
Night brought open-endedness to the place. Through the machine on my desk, I could disappear
down the coaxial rabbit hole to any port of call. I had a phone I could dial out on but which never rang. I
had a white board and bright pastel markers that wiped off without a trace. I amused myself by writing
out, in different colors, as many first lines of books as I could remember. Now and then I cheated,
verifying them on the web.
These nights were dead with exhilaration. Like battening down in the face of a major maritime storm.
All I could do was stock the mental candles and wait.

On such a night, I met Lentz. From my first glimpse, he seemed the person I'd come back to U. to
meet. While I stood by, this man prototyped the thing humanity has been after from out of the starting
block. In the year I knew him, Philip Lentz would bring a life back from the dead.
The night in question, I'd diverted myself so successfully with bursts of null activity that I found myself
still in the building well past midnight. I was prowling the corridors on the floor above my office. I stood
outside a conference center, reading a posterboard en-titled "Compliance of Neuronal Growth over
Semiconductor Sub-strate." Someone had encouraged nerve cells to connect themselves in clean,
geometric, living chips. And had electron microscopy shots to prove it.
I felt my perfect solitude. A few fluorescent highlights here and there kept alive the odd captive plant.
As I do when I'm alone, I hummed to myself. Only now, in the distance, I began to hear the music I'd
been humming. Mozart, the Clarinet Concerto, middle movement. The one that C. had thought the most
pained palliative in creation.
Here, in the deserted, empirical dark, years too late, I heard that she was right. In the Center, where
no birds sang, this sound, slowed to a near stop, resigned all hope of ever saying just what its resig-nation
carried. At this impossible hour, when even the most inexo-rable researchers had gone home to whatever
family they could muster for themselves, only music stayed behind to prove the ravishing ir-relevance of
research.
The clarinet and orchestra exchanged phrases, elaborating on the ongoing expansion, unfolding,
inhaling beyond capacity like the lungs of a patriarch wedging open the air after being told of the death of
his last great-grandchild. The endless phrase spoke of how you reach an age when anything you might
answer would not be worth asking.
Who in all this restless measurement had time for so infinite an aside? The late-night auditor, whoever
he was, must have thought he listened alone. Even the cleaning crew had gone. The earliest hard-core
hackers would not stumble in to their predawn keyboarding for another two hours.
Ordinarily, any sound would have driven me to an emergency exit. Now I gravitated to the source,
audiotropic, to secure the forsaken signal.
The tune grew more real. It approached the asymptote of live per-formance. The next turn of the
corridor maze would flush out a covey of tuxedoed instrumentalists. The thread of sound led me to an
office down a spur hallway I did not know existed. The cell door stood wide open. The phrase issued
from it as if from the wellspring of all improvisation.
The music's hopeless peace emboldened me. I came alongside the door and looked in. Except for