"E. E. Doc Smith - D' Alembert 5 -Appointment at Bloodstar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

vacation. Jules d'Alembert, in the meantime, had been working on another assignment.

No one familiar with the DesPlainian agent would ever have recognized him. His
wrinkled, ill-fitting clothes had been padded to make him look twenty kilos fatter than he
really was. Skilled makeup had aged him fifteen years; there were puffy, dark circles
under his eyes and worry lines on a receding hairline that was really a superb wig. His
front teeth were slightly more protruding than usual, and he wore thick, gold-rimmed
spectacles. His walk was not the springy, active bounce of a young man in prime
physical condition, but instead the slow, shuffling gait of an older man who is undecided
where he's going and not even sure he wants to get there.

He stepped forward out of the shuttle that had brought him and a dozen others up to
the Complex from Earth, then waited in line patiently to get through the checkpoint.
When his turn came he stepped up to the window and offered his ID pass. The clerk
took it and put it in the scanner, then began asking the same routine questions he'd
asked every day for a week since Jules had started coming up here. "Name?"

"Pierre Abelard." "Occupation?" "Librarian." "Reason for using computer facilities?"
"Research project 1557-FA-724G."

Jules's voice was fed through a microphone, and the voiceprint was compared to the
"known" voiceprint of the fictitious Pierre Abelard. When the green light lit up to indicate
a match, the clerk inserted Jules's ID pass into a retinoscope. "Look into here, please."

Jules did as instructed, and the clerk measured his retinal patterns against those on the
card. It was another match. "Smooth, you're cleared through to Checkpoint B-16. Here's
your card back. Take the tram to your right."

Jules took back his card, walked through the gate and went over to the small automated
cart the clerk had indicated. He punched his destination into the cart's control box and
sat back as his conveyance carried him to the designated area. As he passed through
the enormous corridors he could almost sense the feverish activity . being carried on
through the Complex all around him. Data were constantly being fed into the memory
banks by an army of operators-information on every conceivable subject: rainfall
statistics for the planet Belange, birth records for the past month in Sector Twelve,
financial reports for the leading industrial firms on the Imperial Stock Exchange, retinal
patterns for the latest group of felons exiled to Gastonia-anything and everything that
could conceivably be of importance or interest to the Empire was recorded here for


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posterity. Some early critics of the facility had worried about the invasion of privacy that
might stem from the use of this computer, but the sheer volume of data had put an end
to those fears. A full cross-check on any individual was too involved a procedure to be
done on a whim. The anonymity of the average individual was assured by the very
complexity of the system.

Jules's cart stopped at Checkpoint B-16 as directed, and Jules went through another