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

With her sly grin Marta said, “He wants you to make it happen, Leo. He’s like the Road Runner and
you’re Wile E. Coyote. He gets you to run off the edge of a cliff, and then you have to build the bridge
back to the cliff before you fall.”

“But it never works! He always falls!”

Marta laughed at him. She liked him, but she was tough. “Come on,” she said. “This time we’ll do it.”

Leo nodded, tried to calm down. He appreciated Marta’s spirit, and liked to be at least as positive as
the most positive person in any given situation. That was getting tough these days, but he smiled the best
he could and said, “Yeah, right, you’re good,” and started to put on rubber gloves.

“Remember the time he announced that we had hemophilia A whipped?” Brian said.

“Please.”

“Remember the time he put out a press release saying he had decapitated mice at a thousand rpm to
show how well our therapy worked?”

“The guillotine turntable experiment?”

“Please,” Leo begged. “No more.”

He picked up a pipette and tried to focus on the work. Withdraw, inject, withdraw, inject—alas, most
of the work in this stage was automated, leaving people free to think, whether they wanted to or not.
After a while Leo left them to it and went back to his office to check his e-mail, then helplessly to read
what portion of Derek’s press release he could stomach. “Why does hedo this, why why why?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Marta and Brian were now standing in the doorway, and Marta was
implacable: “I tell you—he thinks he canmake us do it.”

“It’s notus doing it,” Leo protested, “it’s the gene. We can’t do a thing if the altered gene doesn’t get
into the cell we’re trying to target.”

“You’ll just have to think of something that will work.”

“You mean like, build it and they will come?”

“Yeah. Say it and they will make it.”

Out in the lab a timer beeped, sounding uncannily like the Road Runner.Meep-meep! Meep-meep!
They went to the incubator and read the graph paper as it rolled out of the machine, like a receipt out of
an automated teller—like money out of an automated teller, in fact, if the results were good. One very big
wad of twenties rolling out into the world from nowhere, if the numbers were good.

And they were. They were very good. They would have to plot it to be sure, but they had been doing
this series of experiments for so long that they knew what the raw data would look like. The data were
good. So now theywere like Wile E. Coyote, standing in midair staring amazed at the viewers, because a
bridge from the cliff had magically extended out and saved them. Saved them from the long plunge of a
retraction in the press and subsequent NASDAQ free fall.