"Martha Soukup - Things Not Seen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Soukup Martha)

"Yeah, but if you lose your jobтАФI was talking to some Lloydies about Herrera, back when he lived
there. You know he lived in Lloyd House, just like I did?"

"No. Small world." Ginnie had an old college friend who'd dropped out of physics and started a small
import business up in Oregon. Maybe he could use a programmer to make the shipping end of it more
efficient. If she could get used to living with pine trees. Or maybe she could get a job on the loading
dock. She hugged the cushion to her cheek.

"They were telling me stories about his Ditch Day stack. It was pretty memorable."

On Senior Ditch Day at CalTech, the seniors set puzzles, called "stacks," for the underclassmen to solve.
The underclassmen had to solve the puzzle to gain entry to the senior's room. If they didn't find a
"bribe"тАФusually junk foodтАФwaiting for them there, they had the right to counterstack the senior's room,
giving her a taste of her own medicine.

Ginnie, distracted by killer finals, had simply thrown together a quiz for her stack. When the group trying
to get into her room answered some trivia questions on her computer and solved what she'd thought was
a fairly knotty programming puzzle, the computer told them where they could find her room key. She'd
left a keg of beer and ten pounds of chocolate in the room, and when she got back from her Ditch Day
trip to Disneyland, she found nothing but candy wrappers remaining of the bribe.

. She still regretted not taking the time to come up with a finesse stack, something the underclassmen
would bash their brains against all day but which would be obvious, in light of the clues, when they found
out what it was.

"They got to his room and found a video monitor and a joystick outside the door," George said. "And a
note that just said, 'Get the key or solve why it can't be done.' "

"Sounds like a good one," Ginnie said, interested despite herself.

"When they turned on the video monitor, it showed the interior of his room, like the camera was next to
the door. It looked ordinary enough, but the floor was entirely cleared, and in the middle of it was the
room key, and this little cart, with an arm in front and an antenna sticking up.

"Yeah, one of them picked up the joystick and moved it around, and the cart turned around with it. One
button on the joystick raised and lowered the arm, and the other made the cart go forward or backward.
The arm had a magnet on it, and there was a washer taped to the key, so the magnet could pick it up."

"Too easy. There's a catch."

"You bet. It looked like the idea was to maneuver the cart over to the door with the key, and get it to
push it out under the door. But they couldn't quite get the cart to work right. It'd start toward the door,
and suddenly veer off in the wrong direction. Or it would stop moving. Or the key would fall off."

"Some kind of kink programmed into the cart's movement."

"They thought of that. They plotted all the unexplained movements and looked for a pattern. Like, if you
turn it 180 degrees to the left, maybe it would go backward. Well, it did sometimes, and it didn't
sometimes."