"Leo Frankowski - Copernicks Rebellion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

see to it that you get the full treatment. Then you can be any age you
want."
"Lou, you have a deal. As long as you don't ask me to do anything
that's against my conscience. Where do I go to get this treatment? You
know that I don't have much time."
"I'll pick you up tomorrow afternoon. We have a facility right here, in
Crystal City-a good spit from the Pentagon."
"You built a facility here for me?"
"Moe, what makes you think that you're the only aging congressman
in need of our help?"
"Somehow I've got the idea that your tree houses are going to be left
alone." The senator laughed.
Later, on their way to Daisey's party, the senator said, "Lou, if you
could be any age you wanted to be, why did you want to look like a
college kid?"
"The college girls, Moe. The pretty college girls." Von Bork laughed.


Martin Guibedo sat at his microscalpel, making another tree. He was
a marshmallow man, just five feet tall, and of considerable girth. His
unruly hair and mustache were white and thick, and his wrinkled red
face gave no hint of pain or doubt or sadness. Calloused hands moved
over the controls with the agility of a competent surgeon of fifty.
Actually, he was over ninety, and had seen most of his friends die.
"Ach! You're going to be such a beauty, you!" he said to the
yard-long strand of DNA, watching the assembly of a string of bases
that would give this model a nine-foot bed.
In principle, the apparatus was simple. A tiny beaker contained a
mixture of cytosine, inosine, thymine, adenine, and a few other
chemicals in otherwise pure water. A long organic molecule was being
slowly drawn from the beaker with the various bases attaching
themselves randomly to its end. As each new base was drawn out, it
was scanned by an X-ray resonance microscope, which identified the
base and compared it against a model stored in the memory of a very
large computer. When, by chance, it was the correct base, it was
allowed to pass. When it was not, an X-ray laser sliced it off, and the
end of the molecule was reinserted in the beaker to try again. The
process was automatic, yet it required continuous monitoring, for one
error in ten billion decisions could result in a monstrosity instead of a
comfortable home.
"You're just what my nephew Heiny wanted. And your lights are
going to go on and off, and your synthesizer ain't going to go spritzing
beer all over the kitchen, so Heiny ain't got to get into a bathing suit and
chop it off with a boy scout axe, like he did last time. Ach. And it was
such good beer, too!" Gnarled fingers danced on the controls.
He had been born in Leipzig in 1910, with an Italian-Catholic father
and a Polish-Jewish mother. His father's civil engineering work had
caused the family to move often around Europe. Martin's parentage and
experiences had left him with an improbable accent, a profound
disrespect for institutions, and an open contempt for governments.