"Jeff Hecht - Engineering Reality" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hecht Jeff)

interlock so he could leave the case open, then stepped back. "Watch the
screen and see what this does," he said, turning the key interlock to start
the laser.
Ping, ping, ping, ping, _BANG!_ went the laser.
Jose hit the floor. Ravi swore more foul-sounding words. Something
bounced off the ceiling tiles and onto the floor. The room smelled of the
ozone of an electric discharge and the smoke of something electrical burning.
There was no more pinging.
"What was it?" asked Jose, looking up from the floor.
There was no answer.
 Frightened, Jose looked under the optical table to see if something had
happened to Ravi. He saw the other engineer's legs, running. Then he heard the
whoosh of a fire extinguisher.
"That is the end of that," sighed Ravi.
Jose stood up, slowly and carefully. Halon foam covered the remains of
the power supply and the laser head. "That was the best laser rod we had," he
sighed.
"And it only gave us fifty lousy millijoules a pulse. The colonel is
going to blow her top. Six months late, and now we don't have a working system
to show her."
"At least we've got the data stored in memory. I'll put it on disk
and..." Jose stopped cold as he glanced at the blank screen. The instruments
must have been on the same circuit breaker as the laser. With the power gone,
the data was gone forever. "Oh no!"
Ravi took off his safety goggles and stared silently at the dead
instruments. "Gone?"
The younger man nodded grimly.
"If anything can go wrong, it will," Ravi muttered, tossing his goggles
onto the table, where they slipped into the foamy mess. "What was the best you
recorded this afternoon?"
"It wasn't very good. Maybe ten millijoules." Jose hoped it was that
much.
"And what about another demo? Do you think we have enough pieces? I
can't remember what we did with that other laser head..."
"It had optical damage to the rod. I sent out for repairs last week."
"We have to do something," Ravi pleaded. "They fire project managers
for things like this. I have kids in college!"
"Maybe we could pray?"
"Pray? For what? For mercy from management?"
A glimmer of an idea tickled the back of Jose's mind. "You're a Hindu
aren't you?"
Ravi gave the younger man a strange look. The two had never talked
about religion, and it seemed a strange time to start. "Well, yes, sort of."
It was something he hadn't thought about in quite a while.
"So you've got lots of gods, right?"
Ravi nodded slowly.
"Is there a god of engineering?"
The older man's eyes opened wide. "I never heard of one. The Hindu
religion is thousands of years old; it goes back before there were engineers."
"But maybe there is one and you can pray to him even if you don't know