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

more minutes. In his first months she had had to pinch his nostrils together to get him to come off, but
now a tap on the nose would do it, for the first breast at least. On the second one he was more
recalcitrant. She watched the second hand on the big clock in his room sweep up and around. When they
were done he would go back to sleep and snooze happily until about nine, Charlie said.

She hefted him back into his crib, buttoned up and kissed all her boys lightly on the head. Charlie
mumbled “Call me, be careful.” Then she was down the stairs and out the door, her big work bag over
her shoulder.

The cool air on her face and wet hair woke her fully for the first time that day. It was May now and the
late spring mornings had only a little bit of chill left to them, a delicious sensation given the humid heat that
was to come. Fat gray clouds rolled just over the buildings lining Wisconsin Avenue. Truck traffic roared
south. Splashes of dawn sunlight struck the metallic blue sheen of the windows on the skyscrapers up at
Bethesda Metro, and as Anna walked briskly along it occurred to her, not for the first time, that this was
one of the high points of her day. There were some disturbing implications in that fact, but she banished
those and enjoyed the feel of the air and the tumble of the clouds over the city.

She passed the Metro elevator kiosk to extend her walk by fifty yards, then turned and clumped down
the little stairs to the bus stop. Then down the big stairs of the escalator, into the dimness of the great tube
of ribbed concrete that was the underground station. Card into the turnstile,thwack as the triangular
barriers disappeared into the unit, pull her card out and through to the escalator down to the tracks. No
train there, none coming immediately (you could hear them and feel their wind long before the lights set
into the platform began to flash) so there was no need to hurry. She sat on a concrete bench that
positioned her such that she could walk straight into the car that would let her out at Metro Center
directly in the place closest to the escalators down to the Orange Line East.

At this hour she was probably going to find an open seat on the train when it arrived, so she opened her
laptop and began to study one of the jackets, as they still called them: the grant proposals that the
National Science Foundation received at a rate of fifty thousand a year. “Mathematical and Algorithmic
Analysis of Palindromic Codons as Predictors of a Gene’s Protein Expression.” The project hoped to
develop an algorithm that had shown some success in predicting which proteins any given gene sequence
in human DNA would express. As genes expressed a huge variety of proteins, by unknown ways and
with variations that were not understood, this kind of predicting operation would be a very useful thing if
it could be done. Anna was dubious, but genomics was not her field. It would be one to give to Frank
Vanderwal. She noted it as such and queued it in a forward to him, then opened the next jacket.

The arrival of a train, the getting on and finding of a seat, the change of trains at Metro Center, the
getting off at the Ballston stop in Arlington, Virginia: all were actions accomplished without conscious
thought, as she read or pondered the proposals she had in her laptop. The first one still struck her as the
most interesting of the morning’s bunch. She would be interested to hear what Frank made of it.



Coming up out of a Metro station is about the same everywhere: up a long escalator, toward an oval of
gray sky and the heat of the day. Emerge abruptly into a busy urban scene.

The Ballston stop’s distinction was that the escalator topped out in a big vestibule leading to the multiple
glass doors of a building. Anna entered this building without glancing around, went to the nice little
open-walled shop selling better-than-usual pastries and packaged sandwiches, and bought a lunch to eat
at her desk. Then she went back outside to make her usual stop at the Starbucks facing the street.