"Brian Lumley - E-Branch 1 - Defilers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

other.
It was much the same for many of Trask's espers. lan Goodly had difficulty reading Jake's future,-
even Liz Merrick-who had something of a rapport with Jake-could get into his mind only when he was
asleep and his shields were down. And that was yet another reason why Trask . . . why he didn't
like him? Why he couldn't cotton to him? Because it was Trask himself, the boss, the faultless
Head of E-Branch, who must break the Branch's unspoken moral code by using Liz to discover what
was going on in there, in Jake's unruly head.
Unruly, yes, and Trask was sure that he still had his own agenda, that given the chance he'd go


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off and do his own thing, and maybe even get himself killed doing it. What, Luigi Castellano? A
gang boss, drug-runner, torturer, and murderer with the Italian and French police-some of them,
anyway-in his pay, and Mafia contacts deep in the heart of degenerate Russia? You couldn't be a
one-man army against odds like that and get away with it. You needed backing. Backing such as E-
Branch might be willing to supply, and even Gustav Turchin,

if only Jake would back off and give them the chance. If only he'd accept that he now had
responsibilities ranging far wider than the gratification of his own blood-lust. And:
Hah! Trask gave a derisive snort. Jake Cutter's blood-lust, indeed! But the fact was that Trask
wanted Jake for himself, to use in satisfying bis blood-lust, his craving for the blood and the
lives of the Wamphyri.
At the end of the corridor, people were going into the ops room. "Two minutes," said John Grieve,
catching up with Trask and passing him. And three of four more of them right behind him, making
sure they'd be there before he got started. He paused at the doors to let them go by, looked back
and saw that the corridor was now empty, and followed them in ...
The ops room. Half of it given over to gadgets, mainly communications, like the eye-in-the-sky
links that could zoom in on an ongoing battle in Ethiopia and show you a pretty decent (indecent?)
picture of a soldier grinning as he pushed his bayonet up the anus of a crucified "rebel." Or the
links to GCHQ, the listening station that could tap any insecure (and some "secure") telephone
conversations anywhere in the world. Or the extraps, computers whose sole function was to
extrapolate: to use as many as possible of the known conditions of today's world to try to
determine and describe the world of tomorrow.
Pretty amazing stuff. . . until you realized what it really was, that all it was was a
disassociated brain controlling nothing whatsoever. Using it, you could see and hear, but you
could never taste, smell, or touch. And except on rare occasions you couldn't change anything
either. Trask sometimes likened it to God-but not exactly, because God is omniscient, and the
computer can know only what you tell it,- even an extrap is only guessing-but he likened it to God
because of his belief that He was "of omnipotent. Having given men free will, how could He
possibly control their actions? Even if He could, how could He apply himself to any single act?
How could He select or correct or counter any single atrocity when a million more were happening
simultaneously all over the world?
Answer: He couldn't. . . and in Trask's case, He hadn't.
Trask had thought a great deal about God since Zek's passing. He had tried to come to terms with
Him, but as yet hadn't quite managed it. Instead he put his faith in the gadgets and the ghosts.
The ops room and its gadgets, which were usually attended by the "techs," the men who controlled
them. But gadgets, like God (in Trask's eyes, at least), simply couldn't do everything. And much
less than God, their eyes and ears couldn't be everywhere at once. Hence the ghosts.