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

"So it had random error programmed into it, and that's why they couldn't get it to work?"

"But how do you 'prove' that? It's a finesse stack: there has to be something big and deceptively obvious
they can point to, or Herrera's screwed it up. They're starting to get very annoyed, because they can see
the room and they don't see a bribe in it. These are students who are seriously looking forward to
skipping the counterstack and just trashing his room if they solve the stack. It looks like he expected it to
be impossible to solve, and that's not fair."

"What did it turn out to be?" Ginnie asked.

"Think about it. There are three components of the puzzle they can look at: there's the remote-controlled
cart, and the joystick, and the video monitor/ camera setup. They can't get to the cart,except by
experimenting with the joystick and watching on the monitor." "The joystick."

"They took it apart, carefully, and looked at it. Nothing funny in the joystick that they could see."

"The monitor?"

"It was late in the day when this one bright freshman began to wonder if the monitor was showing them
the whole story. Some big-shot junior guy had the joystick, but she finally talked him into handing it to
her. She moved the cart all the way to the back wall, and started to make it go back and forth, against
the wall, as fast as she could."

"What did that prove?"

"In the middle of the room, the cart blinked out of existence on the video monitor. She moved it back,
and half of it was gone. Then it came back again."

"You've lost me."

"Remember when we were kids watching a weather report, and the reporter was wearing a green tie,
and you could see Indiana right through it?"

"IтАФoh! It was a chroma key setup!"

"She pounded on the door and shouted 'Open up, Ralph!' and Herrera opened the door from the inside.
The whole back wall of the room was draped in green, he'd painted the floor green, and he was wearing
a green bodysuit and a green hood."

"Yep. She'd proved why they couldn't get the key. It was one of those old-fashioned setups that
screened out greens, the kind they used when they wanted it to look like the weather guy was standing in
front of a weather map or a live shot of a sunset or something."

"I suppose he could find all the equipment for that on campus," Ginnie said.

"Actually, I think he salvaged it from a station that was upgrading its technology. Just like on the weather
report, where the camera saw green, the chroma key showed a video image he'd taken earlier instead, of
the normal back and floor of the room. So in his green cover-up, he was invisible to the camera. As long
as he stayed behind the cart, from camera view, he could mess with its movements without being