"Captain Anger Adventure #1 The Microbotic Menace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Koman Victor)

Chapter Nine The Weapon Makers

Captain Anger gritted his teeth.

None but his friends and long-time companions Rock and Leila noticed, or even knew why. Only the hardening of his gaze, the tightening of the muscles along his strong jawline gave any clue to his emotion.

The three had entered a place of war.

Lawrence Livermore was a scientific research laboratory very similar to the Anger Institute. In low-lying buildings amid footpaths lined with trees, scientists spent their days in contemplation of fascinating and obscure aspects of the laws of nature. With unbridled enthusiasm, they tinkered with mighty machines and miniature wonders, pushing the limits of physics and engineering to astounding extremes.

But where the Anger Institute dedicated its efforts solely and exclusively toward the betterment of mankind, Lawrence Livermore had another, darker duty. Under contract to the federal government, scientists there daily researched new and more powerful ways to kill.

They did not view their jobs in such a light. In their own minds, these powerful thinkers considered their tasks to be nothing less than the dispassionate inquiry into the workings of nature. They pondered sub-atomic particles and found ways to break them into the fundamental building blocks of the Universe. What the politicians did with such information, they thought, lay beyond their realm of expertise. They were scientists, not philosophers.

Captain Anger knew better. As a merchant marine in his younger days, he had stumbled upon many wars fought with weapons of far less sophistication than those designed by his fellow scientists at Lawrence. Even the crudest devices brought misery and devastation wherever they fell.

Cap could not quite bring himself to hate these scientists who toiled in ignorance of the consequences of their actions, but to him the place spoke of death.

He followed Dr. Bhotamo down the cool, robin’s egg blue corridor. Willowy Leila and the ursine Russian brought up the rear, wheeling the magnetic suspension unit on a lab cart.

“I have commandeered a lab for you,” Dr. Bhotamo said, “and I give you my personal guarantee that you won’t be disturbed by members of the press or any others.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

Bhotamo ran his ID card through a slot in a set of double doors, which parted at the priority security clearance. Inside was everything Cap would need.

“What exactly are you planning?” Dr. Bhotamo asked.

Cap smiled with a wry expression. “I’m planning to develop a microbotic vaccine.”

•

For hours Captain Anger sat in front of the atomic force microscope. It gave him a superb view of one of the microbot’s infinitesimal control circuits. With the computer-enhanced image uplinked to Flash via satellite, Cap was able-between the two of them-to divine the exact workings of the tiny terror’s gallium-arsenide brain.

“It’s fascinating,” Flash said from his lab at the Institute. “Whoever built this has an incredibly fine grasp of three-dimensional circuit design.”

Cap said nothing. He gazed intently at the complex circuit diagram developing as the computer analyzed the microbot. His deep green eyes drank it all in as though they were bottomless seas of infinite capacity. After a moment, he tapped at the computer keys with swift, sure finger strokes. He superimposed another circuit diagram-different in several ways from the original-over the circuit diagram for the tiny scavenger.

“How’s that, Flash?” was all he said.

After a moment, Flash said, “Looks fine, Cap. That ought to turn it against its own.”

“Let’s try it.” Cap programmed the plasma beam to deposit a new circuit on the microbot’s surface. With stupendous precision, the beam alternately vaporized old pathways and fused new ones with near atomic-width tolerances. Within moments, it was done.

Rock stared at the screen in bafflement. “What does that do?” Though he was one of the most brilliant aerospace propulsion experts in the world, electronics proved a constant source of bewilderment to him. As far as he was concerned, computers were incomprehensible black boxes that one attached to rockets or jets to make them fly. He used computers every day for design and control, but what went on inside them-their electronic guts-he expressed little desire to understand.

“Simple, Rock.” Flash watched the operation on his own terminal screen. Next to that glowed a screen presenting a view of the Lawrence Livermore lab, courtesy of Leila’s videocam. “Cap’s reprogrammed that microbot to seek out the other microbots and reprogram them to stop scavenging. And to become reprogrammers themselves. And nothing else.”

“Let’s test it.” Cap used a microscopic probe to position another, unaltered microbot into the vicinity of the reprogrammed one. Immediately, the latter used its carbon rods to size up the newcomer like one ant feeling out another. When it did, it immediately attacked, carefully cutting new atom-wide pathways into its foe’s circuitry, following the commands indelibly etched into its own memory.

“See?” Flash’s voice said over the earcomm. “Now we have two robots working on our side. Now they won’t destroy anything in their path-they’ll just search for other microbots to reprogram.”

Rock grunted. “And when they run out of microbots to reprogram?”

“They’ll keep searching until they corrode from sunlight and air pollution.” Cap held the probe in front of the mandibles of the newly-reprogrammed creature. It felt at the probe but did nothing to it. Neither did the other. He urged the pair into the teeming millions that made up the tiny silver blob floating on the magnetic field. They immediately attacked one microbot apiece. Now there were four anti-scavengers. Shortly there were sixteen. “These microbots have no defense against being reprogrammed. Whoever built them thought they could overrun anything, making new copies of themselves to replace the older ones. We’ll unleash this countermeasure at the Los Gatos site to handle any stray microbots that might have escaped the freeze. And we’ll keep a few for ourselves.”

Thirty-two. Sixty-four. The electromechanical antidote spread through the mass of scavengers. One hundred twenty-eight. Two hundred fifty-six.

“Any big news today, Flash?” Cap asked, sitting on a lab stool and folding his arms. They were muscled not with the lumps and knots of a body builder, but with the smooth, hard lines of a man of action. Captain Anger had made himself into a man of uncommon strength, but his strength lay in more than mere muscle. His was a strength powered by will and an astonishing self-confidence.

“General Secretary of the United Nations was missing for forty-eight hours,” Flash announced as if reading from a report. “Back at work now with no explanation.”

Cap nodded, storing the piece of information for later consideration. “Anything on Dr. Madsen?”

Flash answered the captain. “The mortgage and utility payments on his Palo Alto home are current, even though he’s been missing for four months.”

“Let’s drop some of these little bugs off in Los Gatos to handle any strays we may have missed, and then go pay his house a personal visit.”