"Paul Preuss - Venus Prime 1 - Breaking Strain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preuss Paul)

into every ward and private room.

He came to L. N. 30851005тАЩs room and entered. The photogram camera was watching from its invisible
position high in the corner; he could keep his back to it, but someone passing in the hall would have a
different angle of view, so he casually swung the door half closed behind him.


file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Bureaub...0-%20Venus%20Prime%201%20-%20Breaking%20Strain.html (10 of 182)23-12-2006 18:54:42
 ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME I



He bent over her unconscious form, then swiftly turned her head upright. Her respiration was steady and
deep. First out of his pocket was a flat CT scope the size of a checkbook. He laid it across her closed
eyes; its screen displayed a map of her skull and brain as if they had been sliced through. Digital
coordinates appeared in one corner of the screen. He adjusted the CT scopeтАЩs depth finder until the gray
matter of the hippocampus was centered.

He was still bent over her. He drew a long hypodermic from his sleeve, a seemingly primitive instrument
frightening in its undisguised purpose. But within the shank of the steel needle nested other needles,
needles within needles, graduated in fineness until the slimmest of them was finer than a human hair,
invisible. They were needles that possessed a mind of their own. He dipped the tip of the barrel in
disinfectant in a small, clear vial. He felt the bridge of her nose, pressed his fingers down to widen her
nostrils, then carefully, inexorablyтАУwatching its progress on the miniature screenтАУhe shoved the long,
telescoping shaft into her brain.

II
The olfactory lobes are perhaps the most atavistic portions of the brain, having evolved in the nervous
systems of blind worms that felt their way through the opaque muck of Cambrian seas. To function they
must be in close contact with the environment, and so, beneath the bridge of the nose, the brain is almost
completely exposed to the outside world. It is a dangerous arrangement. The bodyтАЩs immune system is
incompatible with the brainтАЩs processes, everywhere sealed out by the blood-brain barrierтАУexcept in the
nasal passages, where mucous membranes are the brainтАЩs only defense, and every winter cold is an all-
out struggle against brain disease.

When the defenses are breached, the brain itself feels nothing; the flower of the central nervous system
is itself nerveless. The micro-needle that probed past L. N.тАЩs olfactory lobes and into her hippocampus
left no internal sensation. It did, however, leave an infection, spreading fast. . . .


* **


Waking late, the woman who thought of herself as Sparta felt an itching sensation high in her nose,
beside her right eye.

As recently as yesterday she had been in Maryland, at the project facilities north of the capital. She had
gone to bed in the dormitory, wishing she could be in her own room at her parentsтАЩ home in New York
City but accepting the fact that that would be inappropriate under the current circumstances. Everyone
had been very good to her here. She should have feltтАУshe tried to feelтАУhonored to be where she was.