"Нейл Стефенсон. The Big U (Большое "U", англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

friends. I thought of it as an immense vending machine, cautiously crafted so
that any denomination too ancient or foreign or irregular would rattle about
randomly for a while, find its way into the stairway system, and inevitably
be deposited in the reject tray on the barren back side. Meanwhile, brightly
colored graduates with attractively packaged degrees were dispensed out front
every June, swept up by traffic on the Parkway and carried away for leisurely
consumption. Had I understood this earlier I might have come to my senses and
immediately resigned, but on that hot September day, with the exhaust abrading
our lungs and the noise squashing our conversation, it seemed worthwhile to
circle around to the Main Entrance and give it another try.

We headed east to avoid the stadium. On our right the wall stretched and away
for acres in a perfect cinderblock grid. After passing dozens of fire doors
we came to the corner and turned into the access lot that stretched along the
east wall. Above, at many altitudes, cars and trucks screeched and blasted
through the tight curves of the interchange. People called it the Death
Vortex, and some claimed that parts of it extended into the fourth dimension.
As soon as it had been planned, the fine old brownstone neighborhood that was
its site plummeted into slumhood; Haitians and Vietnamese filled the place up,
and the feds airproofed the buildings and installed giant electric air filters
before proceeding.

Here on the access lot we could look down a long line of loading docks,
the orifices of the Plex where food and supplies were ingested and trash
discharged, serviced by an endless queue of trucks. The first of these docks,
by the northern corner, was specially designed for the discharge of hazardous
wastes produced in Plex labs and was impressively surrounded by fences, red
lights and threatening signs. The next six loading docks were for garbage
trucks, and the rest, all the way down to the Parkway, for deliveries. We
swung way out from the Plex to avoid all this, and followed the fence at the
border of the lot, gazing into the no-man's-land of lost mufflers and shredded
fanbelts beyond, and sometimes staring up into the Plex itself.

The three-by-three block base had six stories above ground and three below.
Atop it sat eight 25-story towers where lived the 40,000 students of the
university. Each tower had four wings 160 feet long, thrown out at right
angles to make a Swiss cross. These towers sat at the four corners and four
sides of the base. The open space between them was a huge expanse of roof
called Tar City, inhabited by great machines, crushed furniture thrown from
above, rats, roaches, students out on dares, and the decaying corpses of
various things that had ventured out on hot summer days and become mired
in the tar. All we could see were the neutral light brown towers and their
thousands and thousands of identical windows reaching into the heavens. Even
for a city person, it was awesome. Compared to the dignified architecture of
the old brownstones, though, it caused me a nagging sense of embarrassment.

The Vortex whose coils were twined around those brown-stones threw out two
ramps which served as entrance and exit for the Plex parking ramp. These ran
into the side of the building at about third-story level. To us they were
useless, so we continued around toward the south side.