"Varley, John - Press Enter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

"How do you know that?"
"I knew that my first day here. I had the computer list the program. Then I compared it to Kluge's style. No way he could have written it. It's tighter'n a bug's ass. Not a spare line in it. Kluge didn't pick his alias for nothing. You know what it means?"
"Clever," I said.
"Literally. But it meansЕ a Rube Goldberg device.
Something overly complex. Something that works, but for the wrong reason. You 'kluge around' bugs in a program. It's the hacker's vaseline."
"So?" Osborne wanted to know.
"So Kluge's programs were really crocked. They were full of bells and whistles he never bothered to clean out. He was a genius, and his programs worked, but you wonder why they did. Routines so bletcherous they'd make your skin crawl. Real crufty bagbiters. But good programming's so rare, even his diddles were better than most people's super-moby hacks."
I suspect Osborne understood about as much of that as I did.
"So you base your opinion on his programming style."
"Yeah. Unfortunately, it's gonna be ten years or so before that's admissible in court, like graphology or fingerprints. But if you know anything about programming you can look at it and see it. Somebody else wrote that suicide note-somebody damn good, by the way. That program called up his last will and testament as a sub-routine. And he definitely did write that. It's got his fingerprints all over it. He spent the last five years spying on the neighbors as a hobby. He tapped into military records, school records, work records, tax files and bank accounts. And he turned every telephone for three blocks into a listening device. He was one hell of a snoop."
"Did he mention anywhere why he did that?" Osborne asked.
"I think he was more than half crazy. Possibly he was suicidal. He sure wasn't doing himself any good with all those pills he took. But he was preparing himself for death, and Victor was the only one he found worthy of leaving it all to. I'd have believed he committed suicide if not for that note. But he didn't write it. I'll swear to that."
We eventually got rid of him, and I went home to fix the dinner. Lisa joined me when it was ready. Once more she had a huge appetite.
I fixed lemonade and we sat on my small patio and watched evening gather around us.
I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating. I sat up, thinking it out, and I didn't like my conclusions. So I put on my robe and slippers and went over to Kluge's.
The front door was open again. I knocked anyway. Lisa stuck her head around the corner.
"Victor? Is something wrong?"
"I'm not sure," I said. "May I come in?"
She gestured, and I followed her into the living room. An open can of Pepsi sat beside her console. Her eyes were red as she sat on her bench.
"What's up?" she said, and yawned.
"You should be asleep, for one thing," I said.
She shrugged, and nodded.
"Yeah. I can't seem to get in the right phase. Just now I'm in day mode. But Victor, I'm used to working odd hours, and long hours, and you didn't come over here to lecture me about that, did you?"
"No. You say Kluge was murdered."
"He didn't write his suicide note. That seems to leave murder.''
"I was wondering why someone would kill him. He never left the house, so it was for something he did here with his computers. And now you'reЕ well, I don't know what you're doing, frankly, but you seem to be poking into the same things. Isn't there a danger the same people will come after you?"
"People?" She raised an eyebrow.
I felt helpless. My fears were not well-formed enough to make sense.
"I don't knowЕ you mentioned agenciesЕ"
"You notice how impressed Osborne was with that? You think there's some kind of conspiracy Kluge tumbled to, or you think the CIA killed him because he found out too much about something, or-"
"I don't know, Lisa. But I'm worried the same thing could happen to you." ж
Surprisingly, she smiled at me.
"Thank you so much, Victor. I wasn't going to admit it to Osborne, but I've been worried about that, too."
"Well, what are you going to do?"
"I want to stay here and keep working. So I gave some thought to what I could do to protect myself. I decided there wasn't anything."
"Surely there's something."
"Well, I got a gun, if that's what you mean. But think about it. Kluge was offed in the middle of the day. Nobody saw anybody enter or leave the house. So I asked myself, who can walk into a house in broad daylight, shoot Kluge, program that suicide note, and walk away, leaving no traces he'd ever been there?"
"Somebody very good."
"Goddam good. So good there's not much chance one little gook's gonna be able to stop him if he decides to waste her."
She shocked me, both by her words and by her apparent lack of concern for her own fate. But she had said she was worried.
"Then you have to stop this. Get out of here."
"I won't be pushed around that way," she said. There was a tone of finality to it. I thought of things I might say, and rejected them all.
"You could at leastЕ lock your front door," I concluded, lamely.
She laughed, and kissed my cheek.
"I'll do that, Yank. And I appreciate your concern. I really do."
I watched her close the door behind me, listened to her lock it, then trudged through the moonlight toward my house. Halfway there I stopped. I could suggest she stay in my spare bedroom. I could offer to stay with her at Kluge's.
No, I decided. She would probably take that the wrong way.
I was back in bed before I realized, with a touch of chagrin and more than a little disgust at myself, that she had every reason to take it the wrong way.
And me exactly twice her age.
I spent the morning in the garden, planning the evening's menu. I have always liked to cook, but dinner with Lisa had rapidly become the high point of my day. Not only that, I was already taking it for granted. So it hit me hard, around noon, when I looked out the front and saw her car gone.