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

Birkson completed a circuit, back to where Bach and Walters were standing. He paused, and
said in a low voice, "Check out that time."

"What time?"

"What time did you say you were going to explode?" he yelled.
 "In three hours, twenty-one minutes, and eighteen seconds," the bomb supplied.

"That time," he whispered. "Get your computers to work on it. See if it's the anniversary of any
political group, or the time something happened that someone might have a grudge about." He started
to turn away, then thought of something. "But most important, check the birth records."

"May I ask why?"

He seemed to be dreaming, but came back to them. "I'm just feeling this character out. I've got a
feeling this might be his birthday. Find out who was born at that timeтАФit can't be too many, down to
the secondтАФand try to locate them all. The one you can't find will be our guy. I'm betting on it."

"What are you betting? And how do you know for sure it's a man?"

That look again, and again she blushed. But, damn it, she had to ask questions. Why should he
make her feel defensive about it?

"Because he's chosen a male voice to put over his speakers. I know that's not conclusive, but
you get hunches after a while. As to what I'm betting... no, it's not my life. I'm sure I can get this one.
How about dinner tonight if I'm right?" The smile was ingenuous, without the trace of lechery she
thought she had seen before. But her stomach was still crawling. She turned away without answering.

For the next twenty minutes, nothing much happened. Birkson continued his slow stroll around
the machine, stopping from time to time to shake his head in admiration. The thirty men and women of
Chief Bach's police detail stood around nervously with nothing to do, as far away from the machine as
pride would allow. There was no sense in taking cover.

Bach herself was kept busy coordinating the behind-the-scenes maneuvering from a command
post that had been set up around the corner, in the Elysian Travel Agency. It had phones and a
computer output printer. She sensed the dropping morale among her officers, who could see nothing
going on. Had they known that surveying lasers were poking their noses around trees in the Plaza,
taking bearings to within a thousandth of a millimeter, they might have felt a little better. And on the
floor below, the X-ray had arrived.

Ten minutes later, the output began to chatter. Bach could hear it in the silent, echoing corridor
from her position halfway between the travel agency and the bomb. She turned, and met a young
officer with the green armband of a rookie. The woman's hand was ice-cold as she handed Bach the
sheet of yellow printout paper. There were three names printed on it, and below that, some dates and
events listed.

"This bottom information was from the fourth expansion of the problem," the officer explained.
"Very low probability stuff. The three people were all born either on the second or within a
three-second margin of error, in three different years. Everyone else has been contacted."