"Robert F. Young - Hologirl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

the whole night through to make sure she didn't sneak out and bring even more shame to bear on my
good name.
I kicked the sleazy clothes she'd been wearing (I'd made her put them back on) under the bed.
"Clinton Adams" had long since absconded. I don't know which demoralized him more — glancing over
his shoulder and seeing me or the look in my eyes. Whichever, he'd dressed and departed posthaste.
 I was still a little shaky when I slipped behind the wheel of my Blue Jay, and to calm myself I went for
a ride in the park. It was well after nine when I took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor of the
Sespol Sky-Rise. The first thing I did was swing my handbag against the recessed case that held the
antique fireman's ax. When the glass window shattered, I seized the ax and entered the Talent Associates
reception room. Goldilocks and the Three Bears were there, and so were Bernie and Sam. Ms. Cecily
Sturmi Kurilman sat behind her mahoganoid desk like a becalmed brown battleship, gazing raptly at a
point in space just above Goldilocks' head. Her husband was wading back and forth through the pile
carpeting, wringing his hands and saying over and over, "What other girls? What other girls?"
All of them gaped when I came in with my ax.
I walked past them, kicked open the inner door, went into the intermediate waiting-room and
smashed that damned mirror to smithereens. Behind it stood a Christmas-treelike complex of crystals,
tubes, wires and widgets. I smashed that too. Behind where it had been, separated from me by a
soundproof paraglass partition, the cream of yesterday's crop of hologirls, wearing hand-me-down
pajamas, were lolling on studio couches, eyes focused on the screen of an inculcator. The culls were
nowhere to be seen.

No one tried to stop me on my way out. After I replaced the fireman's ax in its recessed case, I went
down and got in my Blue Jay and headed for my apartment.
On the way, I stopped off at the Idealia Public Library and did some belated research.
"In laser holography," I told Sespol the next morning, "a laser beam is divided by means of a mirror.
One of the two resultant beams is used to illuminate the subject, and the reflection from the subject is cast
upon a photographic plate. The other beam is reflected from the mirror directly upon the plate. This is the
reference beam. Merging on the plate with the light coming from the subject, it creates an interference
pattern. When the reference beam only is directed upon the plate, the rays passing through the plate
translate the interference pattern into an exact 3-D duplicate, called a 'virtual image,' of the subject. This
was Thomas Wentworth's starting point when he set out to invent his 'holoplicator.' "
For a change, Sespol's gaze wasn't directed at my legs. It was directed straight across my desktop at
my face. "And you smashed this — this machine?"
"You know perfectly well I did. You covered up for me, didn't you?"
"Yes. But not for your sake. For the sake of the Sespol Sky-Rise.... But why did you smash it?
Surely not just to keep Odrussi from getting his hands on it. He couldn't have — not with the IRS on the
scene."
"With Cecily Kurilman also on the scene, he just might have. Wentworth's machine," I went on,
"employed only the basic principles of laser holography. It went as far beyond them as four-dimensional
geometry goes beyond plane geometry. It could create life-size 3-D images in space, and it could create
them so forcibly that they acquired separate realities. With inanimate objects, the duration of these
realities was so evanescent as to be nil. For reasons we'll never know, only image-realities comprised of
living cells retained reality for any appreciable length of time — in the case of humans, for as long
sometimes as forty-six hours. But Wentworth's purpose wasn't to holoplicate people — he doesn't like
people. What he wanted was to accumulate permanent holoplications of objets d'art. When the
holoplications refused to retain reality for more than a split second, he wrote the machine off as a failure,
and when Kurilman offered to buy him out — the machine, having been built on company time, belonged
to the company — he jumped at the chance. In her own sweet way Kurilman's wife had seen its
possibilities instantly. After the deal went through, she took a crash-course in speedteaching. Six months
later, Talent Associates was born.