"Big U, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

rounded blue back of the guard. Most of them had been recruited out
of Korea or the Big One. The glass cages of the Plex had ruined their
bodies. Now they had become totally passive in their outlook; but,
by the same token, they had become impossible to faze or surprise.
We stepped through more glass doors and were in the Main
Lobby.
The Plex's environmental control system was designed so that
anyone could spend four years there wearing only a jockstrap and a
pair of welding goggles and yet never feel chilly or find the place too
dimly lit. Many spent their careers there without noticing this.
Casimir Radon took less than a day to notice the pitiless fluorescent
light. Acres of light glanced off the Lobby's poiished floor like sun
off the Antarctic ice, and a wave of pain now rolled toward Casimir
from near the broad vinyl information desk and washed over him,
draining through a small hole in the center of his skull and pooling
coldly behind his eyes. Great patches of yellow blindness appeared
in the center of his vision and he coasted to a stop, hands on eyes,
mouth open. I knew enough to know it was migraine, so I held his
skinny arm and led him, blind, to his room in D Tower. He lay
cautiously down on the naked plastic mattress, put a sock over his
eyes and thanked me. I drew the blinds, sat there helplessly for a
while, then left him to finish his adjustment to the Big U.
Alter that he wore a uniform of sorts: old T-shirt, cutoffs or gym
shorts, hightop tennis shoes ("to keep the rats off my ankles") and
round purple mountain-climbing goggles with leather bellows on the
sides to block out peripheral light. He was planning such a costume
as I left his room. More painfully, he was beginning to question
whether he could live in such a place for even one semester, let alone
four. He did not know that the question would be decided for him,
and so he felt the same edgy uncertainty that nagged at me.


Some people, however, were quite at home in the Flex. At about
this time, below D Tower in the bottom sublevel, not far from the
Computing Center, several of them were crossing paths in a dusty
little dead end of a hallway. To begin with, three young men were
standing by the only door in the area, taking turns peering into the
room beyond. The pen lights from their shirt pockets illuminated a
small windowless room containing a desk, a chair and a computer
terminal. The men stared wistfully at the latter, and had piled their
math and computer textbooks on the floor like sandbags, as though
they planned a siege. They had been discussing their tactical
alternatives for getting past the door, and had run the gamut from
picking the lock to blowing it open with automatic-weapon bursts,
but so far none had made any positive moves.
"If we could remove that window," said one, a mole-faced
individual smelling of Brut and sweat and glowing in a light blue
iridescent synthetic shirt and hi-gloss dark blue loafers, "we could
reach in and unlock it from inside."
"Some guy tried to get into my grandma's house that way one