"Eric Frank Russell - With a Strange Device" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

used an X-ray machine, a lie-detector, a stereoscopic camera, a finger-printing outfit and several other
sinister devices. The great protective wall surrounding the research plant was in keeping with what lay
within. Offices, departments, machine- shops and laboratories were rigidly compartmentalized with steel
doors and stubborn guards blocking the way from one area to another. Each self-contained section was
defined by the colour of its corridors and doors, the higher up the spectrum the greater the secrecy and
priority in security assigned to a given area.



Workers in yellow-door areas were not allowed to pass through blue doors. Toilers behind blue doors
could `go slumming' as they called it by entering a yellow or lower priority area but were strictly
forbidden to stick their noses the other side of purple doors. Not even the security guards could go
beyond a black door without a formal invitation from the other side. Only theblackdoor men and the
President and God Almighty could amble around other sections as they pleased and explore the entire
plant.



Throughout the whole of this conglomeration ran its intricate nervous system in the form of wires buried
in the walls, ceilings, and, in some cases, floors.Wires linking up with general alarm bells and sirens, or
with door-locking mechanisms, or delicate microphones or television scanners. All the watching and
listening was done, of course, by black door-section snoopers. Inmates had long accepted the necessity
of being continually heard and seen, even when in the toilet-for where better than the little room in which
to memorize, copy or photograph classified data.



Such trouble, ingenuity and expensewas useless from the viewpoint of outside and unfriendly eyes. The
place was, in fact, a veritableSingapore , wide open to attack from an unseen and unexpected quarter.
There was no good reason why any source of blows should be unimagined except, perhaps, that the
apprehensive can be so excessively thorough as to overlook the obvious.



And in spite of hints and forewarnings the obvious was overlooked. The people at the top of the
research centre's plant were highly qualified experts, each inhis own field and therefore ignorant of other
fields. The chief bacteriologist could talk for hours about a new and virulent germ without knowing
whether Saturn has two moons or ten. The head of ballistics department could draw graphs of
complicated trajectories without being able to say whether an okapi belongs to the horse, deer, or giraffe
families. The entire place was crammed with experts of every kind save one - the one who could see and
understand a hint when it became visible.



For example, nobody found any significance in the fact that while the plant's employees bore security
measures,searchings , andsnoopings with resigned fortitude, most of them disliked the colour area
system. Colour had become a prestige symbol. The yellow-area man considered himself down-graded
with respect to his blue-area counterpart even though getting the same salary. The man who worked
behind red doors viewed himself as several cuts above awhitedoor man and so on.