"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

He called the Jackson labs and ordered new and different strains of mice, each strain with its own
number and bar code and genome. He got his labтАЩs machines scheduled, and assigned the techs to use
them, moving some things to the front burner, others to the back, all to accommodate this projectтАЩs
urgency.

On certain days, he went into the lab where the mouse cages were kept, and opened a cage door. He
took out a mouse, small and white, wriggling and sniffing the way they did, checking things out with its
whiskers. Quickly he shifted it so that he was holding it at the neck with the forefingers and thumbs of
both hands. A quick hard twist and the neck broke. Very soon after that the mouse was dead.

This was not unusual. During this round of experiments, he and Brian and Marta and the rest of them
tourniqueted and injected about three hundred mice, drew their blood, then killed and rendered and
analyzed them. That was an aspect of the process they didnтАЩt talk about, not even Brian. Marta in
particular went black with disgust; it was worse than when she was premenstrual, as Brian joked (once).
Her headphones stayed on her head all day long, the music turned up so loud that even the other people
in the lab could hear it. Terrible, ultraprofane hip-hop rap whatever. If she canтАЩt hear she canтАЩt feel, Brian
joked right next to her, Marta oblivious and trembling with rage, or something like it.

But it was no joke, even though the mice existed to be killed, even though they were killed mercifully,
and usually only some few months before they would have died naturally. There was no real reason to
have qualms, and yet still there was no joking about it. Maybe Brian would joke about Marta (if she
couldnтАЩt hear him), but he wouldnтАЩt joke about that. In fact, he insisted on using the word тАЬkillтАЭ rather
than тАЬsacrifice,тАЭ even in write-ups and papers, to keep it clear what they were doing. Usually they had to
break their necks right behind the head; you couldnтАЩt inject them to тАЬput them to sleep,тАЭ because their
tissue samples had to be clear of all contaminants. So it was a matter of breaking necks, as if they were
tigers pouncing on prey. Marta was as blank as a mask as she did it, and very deftly too. If done
properly it paralyzed them so that it was quick and painlessтАФor at least quick. No feeling below the
head, no breathing, immediate loss of mouse consciousness, one hoped. Leaving only the killers to think
it over. The victims were dead, and their bodies had been donated to science for many generations on
end. The lab had the pedigrees to prove it. The scientists involved went home and thought about other
things, most of the time. Usually the mice deaths occurred in the mornings, so they could get to work on
the samples. By the time the scientists got home the experience was somewhat forgotten, its effects
muted. But people like Marta went home and dosed themselves with drugs on those daysтАФshe said she
didтАФand played the most hostile music they could find, 110 decibels of forgetting. Or went out surfing.
They didnтАЩt talk about it to anyone, at least most of them didnтАЩtтАФthis was what made Marta so obvious,
she would talk about itтАФbut most of them didnтАЩt, because it would sound both silly and vaguely shameful
at the same time. If it bothered them so much, why did they keep doing it? Why did they stay in that line
of business?

ButтАФthat line of business was doing science. It was doing biology, it was studying life, improving life,
increasing life! And in most labs the mouse-killing was done only by the lowliest of techs, so that it was
only a temporary bad job that one had to get through on the way to the good jobs.

SomeoneтАЩs got to do it, they thought.



In the meantime, while they were working on this problem, their good results with the HDL тАЬfactory
cellsтАЭ had been plugged into the paper they had written about the process, and sent upstairs to Torrey
PinesтАЩ legal department, where it had gotten hung up. Repeated queries from Leo got the same e-mailed