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

"I play the guitar, too," Adrian offered, interrupting himself. "But I can't do both at once."

"How sad it's not with you."

Adrian continued the serenade. "I once knew a woman named Suzeee/ Her thighs were like two
marble slabs/ But when I told Suzie I loved her . . ."

With a grieved expression, his hands in his armpits, Murch, the last of Toby's associates, now
slouched out of the room.

Verses of escalating obscenity accompanied Toby's struggles to converse by keyboard with the
overburdened VAX. In a desperate attempt to impress Adrian enough to shut him up, Toby typed in the
magic phrases: the big moron and the
 LITTLE MORON WERE WALKING ALONG THE EDGE OF A CLIFF. THE BIG
MORON FELL OFF. WHY DIDN'T THE LITTLE MORON?

The machine hesitated barely an instant before displaying

BECAUSE IT WAS NOT NEAR THE EDGE.

"Balls," said Toby.

Adrian broke off and leaned toward him intently. "Look, Bridgeman, you do know it's me who
wants you at Compugen? You think Jack Chatterjee ever heard of you before I told him about you? I've
read your stuff. I've run some of your programs, just for fun. I want you in on what I'm doing."

"That's nice," said Toby. "But I haven't an inkling of what that is."

"Then come on," said Adrian, grabbing Toby by the elbow and almost lifting him out of his
chair. "I'm going to have to sneak you inтАФour stuff really if secret." He looked down at Toby. "But
that won't be hard. I can't believe you're this short."

Whenever Adrian was forced to stop for a traffic light, Toby caught a whiff of oily smoke seeping
through the permanently open window on the passenger side of the ancient brown Saab. The car smelled
like an outboard motor-boat, and Adrian steered it like one, swashing from lane to lane down
jam-packed University Avenue toward the freeway.

A mile south along San Francisco Bay they came to the Compugen Corporation's modernistic
mission-style buildings: the two-story research institute, the administrative headquarters fronting
Berkeley's waterfront Aquatic Park, and the square expanse of the factory and warehouse backed up to
the Santa Fe Railroad tracks. Squeezed between the freeway and the tracks, Compugen occupied a
stretch of raw landscaping in an area where so many bioengineering firms had located in recent
yearsтАФdisplacing the scavenger steel mills and chemical plants of times pastтАФthat wags had taken to
calling the neighborhood Protein Valley.

Adrian rolled the Saab through a guarded gate and into the wide parking lot. Beside the short
walkway to the door of the research building there were two empty spaces, one of them reserved for the
handicapped, the other reserved for "Dr. Adrian Storey, Chief Scientist."

Before they got out of the car Adrian rummaged in the glove compartment, found a plastic clip-on