"Tom Purdom-Toys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

should be used if they went inside. Both answers came back as they passed over the east end of the
development and made their turn. The computer's first choice, psycho gas G-11-1, would cover a room
in one hundred and twenty seconds and would make the children submissive and suggestible. The supply
in the standard police car gas kit was the bare minimum required, however, and they couldn't mix it with
other gases. The second choice, gas G-11-8, would cover a room in one hundred and forty seconds and
would make the children deliriously happy-- a dangerously unpredictable state-- but they had twice as
much as they needed.
Fracarro turned off the siren. They dropped to the west-bound lane and passed over the house
concealed in the traffic. Below them thousands of white plastic towers gleamed in the evening sun. Ten
thousand lower-income families lived in a crowded grid two kilometers square. Every family had a lot
twenty meters square surrounded by a high plastic wall and in the southeast corner of every lot there was
a square, five-story house exactly like every other house in the development.
"How do the people in the neighborhood sound?" Edelman asked.
"They're getting restless. Several people may be planning to break into the house in spite of the
hostages and give the kids a good bruising. The computer just talked to a woman who's pleading with us
not to let her husband go in."
"Can you give me a prediction on how long we've got before they get violent?"
The dispatcher paused. "You've got twenty-five minutes," she said after a minute. "It looks like it may
be a real explosion when it comes. I just had the computer replay some of the calls. Those people sound
like they're programmed for murder."
Edelman's left hand closed around the imaginary cello again. He had been a musician for twelve years
before he had become a cop and at times like this fifty thousand a year and a back seat in a third-rate
orchestra looked better than two hundred thousand a year and a socially important job that was
supposed to make the best possible use of his IQ and all the sterling virtues the psychologist claimed they
had found revealed in his psych tests. The genetic engineers had turned lizards into dragons, but they
hadn't turned Charley Edelman into St. George.
He had done undercover work in a lower-income housing development for one of his sociology
courses and he had a vivid picture of the conflicts that sometimes destroyed lower-income family life. In a
family like David Rice's, every member of the family would be waging an unending war for a bigger slice
of Daddy's eighteen-eighty a year. There was no end to all the lovely, desirable, tormenting things
modern technology had created.
Medical treatments that could add a hundred years to David Rice's life span and give him a biological
age of twenty-five until he died; surgical-chemical treatments that could make his daughter as beautiful as
any woman who had ever lived; continuous life-long psychotherapy; home computers; expensive pets;
educational toys guaranteed to raise a child's IQ twenty points; custom-made learning programs that
could teach Mom and Dad how to have complete sexual satisfaction, or their male offspring how to be
the best kid in the neighborhood at any sport or competitive skill you could name... Every house below
his car was an arena and the people who fought the dirtiest were the children. He was looking down on
hundreds of parents who would be glad to take out their anger on any child who gave them a good
excuse. He might be yellower than the psychologists said he was, but if the wrong parent got his hands on
a kid, somebody might get killed and they might lose the hostages, too.
"I guess we'd better go in," he said. "We can always pull back if it looks like somebody's about to get
hurt."
Fracarro nodded. "Shall we try the clown-and-witch act?"
Edelman asked the computer for an estimate on how the children would react to psychodrama Five B
and he and Fracarro rattled off a string of numbers-- their individual numerical estimates of the emotional
stresses on the children. The computer averaged their estimates and made some calculations based on
the information it had about the children inside the house and a graph appeared on the right-hand screen.
The clown-and-witch act would probably put the children off guard, but it might not have any significant
effect on their behavior.