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

Some people, however, were quite at home in the Flex. At about this time,
below D Tower in the bottom sublevel, not far from the Computing Center,
several of them were crossing paths in a dusty little dead end of a hallway.
To begin with, three young men were standing by the only door in the area,
taking turns peering into the room beyond. The pen lights from their shirt
pockets illuminated a small windowless room containing a desk, a chair and a
computer terminal. The men stared wistfully at the latter, and had piled their
math and computer textbooks on the floor like sandbags, as though they planned
a siege. They had been discussing their tactical alternatives for getting past
the door, and had run the gamut from picking the lock to blowing it open with
automatic-weapon bursts, but so far none had made any positive moves.

"If we could remove that window," said one, a mole-faced individual smelling
of Brut and sweat and glowing in a light blue iridescent synthetic shirt and
hi-gloss dark blue loafers, "we could reach in and unlock it from inside."

"Some guy tried to get into my grandma's house that way one time," recalled
another, a skinny, long-haired, furtive fellow who was having trouble tracking
the conversation, "but she took a sixteen-ounce ball-peen hammer and smashed
his hand with it. He never came back." He delivered the last sentence like
the punchline to a Reader's Digest true anecdote, convulsing his pals with
laughter.

The third, a disturbingly 35-ish looking computer science major with tightly
permed blond hair, eventually calmed down enough to ask, "Hey, Gary, Gary!
Did she use the ball end or the peen end?" Gary was irked and confused, He
had hoped to impress them by specifying the weight of the hammer, but he was
stumped by this piece of one-upsmanship; he didn't know which end was which.
He radiated embarrassment for several seconds before saying, "Oh, gee, I don't
know, I think she probably used both of 'em before she was done with the guy.
But that guy never came back."

Their fun was cut short by a commanding voice. "A sixteen-ounce ball-peen
hammer isn't much good against a firearm. If I were a woman living alone I'd
carry a point thirty-eight revolver, minimum. Double action. Effective enough
for most purposes." The startling newcomer had their surprised attention.
He had stopped quite close to them and was surveying the door, and they
instinctively stepped out of his way. He was tall, thin and pale, with thin
brown Bryicreemed hair and dark red lips. The calculator on his hip was the
finest personal computing machine, and on the other hip, from a loop of
leather, hung a fencing foil, balanced so that its red plastic tip hung an
inch above the floor. It was Fred Fine.

"You're the guy who runs the Wargames Club, aren't you," asked the blond
student.

"I am Games Marshall, if that's the intent of your question. Administrative
and financial authority are distributed among the leadership cadre according
to the Constitution."