"John Varley - Picnic On Nearside" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

Was this man really the expert she took him to be, or a plaid-sweatered imposter?

"You can call it a hunch. I'm going to talk to this fellow, and I want you to roll up an industrial
X-ray unit on the level below this while I'm doing it. On the level above, photographic film. You get the
idea?"

"You want to take a picture of the inside of this thing. Won't that be dangerous?"

"Yeah. Are your insurance premiums paid up?"

Bach said nothing, but gave the orders. A million questions were spinning through her head, but
she didn't want to make a fool of herself by asking a stupid one. Such as: how much radiation did a big
industrial X-ray machine produce when beamed through a rock and steel floor? She had a feeling she
wouldn't like the answer. She sighed, and decided to let Birkson have his head until she felt he couldn't
handle it. He was about the only hope she had.

And he was strolling casually around the perimeter, swinging his goddamn putter behind him,
whistling bad harmony with the tune coming from the bomb. What was a career police officer to do?
Back him up on the harmonica?

The scanning cameras atop the bomb stopped their back and forth motion. One of them began to
track Birkson. He grinned his flashiest, and waved to it. The music stopped.

"I am a fifty kiloton nuclear bomb of the uranium-235 type," it said. "You must stay behind the
perimeter I have caused to be erected here. You must not disobey this order."

Birkson held up his hands, still grinning, and splayed out his fingers.

"You got me, bud. I won't bother you. I was just admiring your casing. Pretty nice job, there. It
seems a shame to blow it up."

"Thank you," the bomb said, cordially. "But that is my purpose. You cannot divert me from it."

"Never entered my mind. Promise."

"Very well. You may continue to admire me, if you wish, but from a safe distance. Do not
attempt to rush me. All my vital wiring is safely protected, and I have a response time of three
milliseconds. I can ignite long before you can reach me, but I do not wish to do so until the allotted
time has come."

Birkson whistled. "That's pretty fast, brother. Much faster than me, I'm sure. It must be nice,
being able to move like that after blundering along all your life with neural speeds."

"Yes, I find it very gratifying. It was a quite unexpected benefit of becoming a bomb."

This was more like it, Bach thought. Her dislike of Birkson had not blinded her to the fact that he
had been checking out his hunch. And her questions had been answered: no tape array could answer
questions like that, and the machine had as much as admitted that it had been a human being at one
time.