"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

The smell of Anna’s Starbucks latte wafted in from her office next door, and he could hear her on the
phone already. She too did a lot of talking on the phone. “I don’t know, I have no idea what the other
sample sizes are like…. No, not statistically insignificant, that would mean the numbers were smaller than
the margin of error. What you’re talking about is just statistically meaningless. Sure, ask him, good idea.”

Meanwhile Aleesha, her assistant, was on her phone as well, patiently explaining something in her rich
D.C. contralto. Unraveling some misunderstanding. It was an obvious if seldom acknowledged fact that
much of NSF’s daily business was accomplished by a cadre of African-American women from the local
area, women who often seemed decidedly unconvinced of the earth-shattering importance that their
mostly Caucasian employers attributed to the work. Aleesha, for instance, displayed the most skeptical
politeness Frank had ever seen; he often tried to emulate it, but without, he feared, much success.

Anna appeared in the doorway, tapping on the doorjamb as she always did, to pretend that his space
was an office. “Frank, I forwarded a jacket to you, one about an algorithm.”

“Let’s see if it arrived.” He hitCHECK MAIL , and up came a new one [email protected]. He
loved that address. “It’s here, I’ll take a look at it.”
“Thanks.” She turned, then stopped. “Hey listen, when are you due to go back to UCSD?”

“End of July or end of August.”

“Well, I’ll be sorry to see you go. I know it’s nice out there, but we’d love it if you’d consider putting in
a second year, or even think about staying permanently, if you like it. Of course you must have a lot of
irons in the fire.”

“Yes,” Frank said noncommittally. Staying longer than his one-year stint was completely out of the
question. “That’s nice of you to ask. I’ve enjoyed it, but I should probably get back home. I’ll think
about it, though.”

“Thanks. It would be good to have you here.”

Much of the work at NSF was done by visiting scientists, who came on leave from their home
institutions to run NSF programs in their area of expertise for periods of a year or two. The grant
proposals came pouring in by the thousands, and program directors like Frank read them, sorted them,
convened panels of outside experts, and ran the meetings in which these experts rated batches of
proposals in particular fields. This was a major manifestation of the peer-review process, a process
Frank thoroughly approved of—in principle. But a year of it was enough.

Anna had been watching him, and now she said, “I suppose it is a bit of a rat race.”

“Well, no more than anywhere else. In fact if I were home it’d probably be worse.”

They laughed.

“And you have your journal work too.”

“That’s right.” Frank waved at the piles of typescripts: three stacks forReview of Bioinformatics, two for
The Journal of Sociobiology. “Always behind. Luckily the other editors are better at keeping up.”