"Chalker, Jack L - G.O.D. Inc 3 - The Maze in the Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

"How's that possible?" Sam asked him. "If they use the Labyrinth in known and
charted areas they'll eventually get picked up and trapped."
"Not necessarily. The only real control we have is at the stations and the
switches. Somehow, they were getting around them, and we didn't know how. We had
a lot of people on it, and the trouble was it took us the better part of a year
to get the Board to allow any of us access to the computer security files on the
Labyrinth itself so we could find out what the enemy already knew. I tend to
think of the Labyrinth kind of like a railroad, with a straight track going from
station A to station B via switchpoint C. Of course, you and I know just from
being in it that it's not that simple."
Sam nodded. "There are always four faces on the cube. Four directions other than
continuing in the tunnel. Good Lord! I never thought of that. You mean each cube
goes in four different directions?"
"Uh huh. Now, take any of the sides and go through and you're in a world, right?
That's why we think of the cubes as the only avenues to each of the worlds.
That's wrong, though. Each face represents an alternative, a potential siding.
Most just go to specific worlds, but many are through. Some of those old
extensions were simply curved around to take advantage of temporal differences-a
siding between two switches that would effect near-instantaneous travel, for
example, from our point of view-while others were simply closed off and
abandoned. But they still get power. We can't shut power down to any area
without causing feedback and potentially dangerous disruption to the whole
system. These shut down and unused sidings were taken off the system maps,
access was closed off, and they were as if they had never been-but they were
still there."
Sam nodded. "And after our Company fiend was through with the security and
master database computers, the only guy left with a system map of all those shut
down sidings is our Doctor Carlos. I begin to see the problem, Bill. It also
answers a few questions, though, like how they were able to walk so easily and
undetected up and down the line. How many of these unknown crossing points do
you think there are?"
"We don't know. The computers guess it could run into the thousands. You see, in
the early days, there wasn't a single monolithic Company. Development was by a
government-supervised consortium of companies instead, and each wanted in on the
potential profits in knowledge, new products, new markets, you name it. They all
began building competitively, since due to the consortium they all had the
technology, while whoever built the accesses to the worlds got first rights in
them. Find a weak point, build a siding and a temporary station, and it was
yours. Many are automated and use antiquated and sometimes proprietary means of
switching-proprietary to the companies that built them many generations ago by
Company standards. There aren't even many surviving, records of the smaller
companies that were quickly absorbed or went broke. What we have, Sam, isn't a
straight line of track with charted sidings but a fantastic maze to which we
don't have the key."
"But surely you can find them if you look." "Sure we can-but it takes experts to
locate them, then you have to know how the switch works or figure it out without
damaging it or the power grid, then you can re-map and explore one siding.
Multiply that by the length of the Labyrinth itself and it becomes a nightmare.
It is possible to hide in the Labyrinth, Sam, and it is possible to travel
sometimes great distances by bypassing existing switch points. The only time we