"Paul Preuss - Human Error" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preuss Paul)

What was he supposed to do, pretend he was ninety years old and didn't care? Patronize floozies?
Maybe he should just have himself cut and not tell her. The Church ought to join the twentieth century.

"You'll be all right while I'm gone?"

"Of course, Harry. You just do your job and come home as soon as you can."

His hands tightened on the steering wheel. The older he got, the more people depended on him, and
the more complicated the world became. Thank God he made a pretty penny from the Compugen
Corporation. He needed it. They all needed it.

Six years ago, on the strength of a single article in a trade magazine, he'd gone looking for the
Compugen Corporation. At the time he'd been stagnating, high up in the sales department of one of
Route 128's oldest firms, and he suspected that his employers were stagnating too. He'd read and reread
the piece about the brash upstarts out west who claimed to have made biochips work in a commercial
computer years before the analysts said it could be done. At the end of the week he'd sworn his wife to
secrecy, emptied the secret cache of quarters he kept in a number-10 can in the garage, and caught a
night flight to the coast.

Compugen then was located only a couple of blocks away from its present site, down by the tracks
in Berkeley's industrial flatlands, but six years ago its offices, laboratories, factory, and storerooms had all
been crammed into one small converted chemical warehouse. Jack Chatterjee, Compugen's chief
executive officer and top scientistтАФconcurrently on the faculty of the University of California's medical
school in San FranciscoтАФhad taken a half-hour of his busy Saturday morning to show Harold around
the place. He exhibited the new Python computer with sanguine pride.

Python was to be a business-oriented machine with merely adequate speed. But it was dirt cheap,
and by virtue of its biologically grown memory units (crude organic devices by the standards of just a few
years later), the Python, if not fast, was very capacious indeed, able to store whole libraries of data on a
desk top. Chatterjee had made sure the Python was compatible with the more popular hard- and
software already available; Compugen's quality control was excellent, their warranty generous, and they
planned a lavish advertising campaign. Harold knew Compugen would sell a lot of computers.

The more important question was whether Compugen could keep up with its product, or whether
the company would be caught in the vise of capital-versus-cash that had crushed so many of its
predecessors. By the time Harold was back on the plane to Boston, Chatterjee had convinced him that
the company was financially and administratively prepared for growth. For his part, Harold had talked
himself into a job as Compugen's New England sales representative.

On the plane Harold had second thoughts. It was like starting overтАФand him with a daughter at
Boston College, two boys in high school, little ones dressing in hand-me-downs. Salary? None: he'd earn
a healthy commission on each Python he sold, and authorized expenses would be reimbursed upon
presentation of proper receipts (Harold had no doubt that Chatterjee would personally inspect his
expense reports). And there were those promised year-end bonuses. In stock.

By the time he'd gotten home to Newton he'd swallowed his fears, and through the difficult months
that followed he'd kept up a cheerful front for the benefit of the wife and kids.

The Pythons sold as well as he'd expected. Harold began to breathe easier. There was a scare
when the novelty of biochips wore off, because everybody started to use them and the Python lost its