"Reed, Robert - TreasureBuried" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

monitor lizards, in effect. But how could shy near-humans compete with that
scale of things?

Eventually Wallace was aware of sitting alone, Potz and her coffee gone and his
stomach aching from hunger. He had forgotten lunch. What time was it? Three? He
went to the cafeteria, bought candy bars and Pepsi, then returned to his office
intending to work. Only he found himself daydreaming about Mekal's wife, his
imagination taking him as far as a conversation at the ball park. Of course the
chance of Wallace ever having the chance seemed remote. He was famous for his
imagination --indeed, almost everyone in the industry knew one or two Wallace
stories -- but to save his life he couldn't envision anything more than speaking
to the girl, and then just for a few moments. In passing.

"So forget it," he warned himself. "Get to work, will you?"

Potz had given him some data. Wallace sipped warm Pepsi, then a cold dose of old
coffee, punching up files he had begun during graduate school. They were like
old trusted friends, these files. Trusted but secretive. Genetic maps flowed
past him on the screen, in vivid colors, thousands of base pairs forming unique,
easily recognizable patterns that were almost repeated in other species. Related
ones or not, it didn't matter. Every eukaryotic organism on Earth had excess
DNA. Most of it was leftover stuff from ancient times. Early life had been
sloppy, genetically speaking, full of useless genetic noise that natural
selection had flattened into a kind of hum. Flat, harmless. A lot of the DNA was
poly-A -- adenine bases repeated for huge spans. But what Wallace had noticed
when he was twenty, what had struck him as puzzling, were chunks of DNA buried
in the poly-A. Bursts of static, sort of. There were several thousand base
pairs, some of it common to all eukaryotes. Yet the stuff produced no
polypeptides, nor did it seem to influence the expression of any other genes.
What could be so important that it was shared by green algae and PhDs? He had no
idea. Which was why he recorded new data whenever possible. For more than a
decade, Wallace had plotted the differences between all sorts of species,
finding no evolutionary patterns. None. It was such a useless but distinct bit
of genetic noise -- a biochemical shout, more than anything -- and he found it
humbling to consider the problem every little while. Like now. Potz's algae data
added to the puzzle, and Wallace perched over the screen, hoping against hope
for some kind of inspiration.

What made no sense, he knew, was misunderstood.

Misunderstood, or wrong. And either way Wallace felt a sacred duty to solve or
to fix.

"What are you doing?" asked a girl's voice.

And now Wallace began explaining the problem to the imaginary Mrs. Mekal, her
standing over him with the blonde-white hair hanging limp, the soft ends
brushing against his cheek and feeling very nearly real.

WALLACE WENT to three other softball games. R&D won once, managing to squeak