The Strange Attractor Read Online Free PDF Page A

use some nice hot coffee. Can do?”
    “I think we might manage that,” Wendy said, getting up and heading for the door. Good God, she was as tall as her mother now. Not far short of six feet. But agile with it. Or lissom might be the word. “So,” Bird said, as the closing door deprived Dobie of this pleasing spectacle, “you know our little Wendy, then?”
    “Not so little now.”
    “Indeed she isn’t. Take a seat, why don’t you?… Flits from flower to flower a bit, Wendy does. I don’t mind it when she settles in here, but it’s a bit of a strain having the boss’s daughter typing your letters for you. You always wonder if… However. Yes, Cantwell.” Spinning expertly round in his chair, he extracted a green cardboard folder from a filing cabinet. “Should be all in here. What was it you wanted to know, exactly?”
    “I don’t quite know what I want to know. That’s the trouble. Basically I’m curious as to why he did it.”
    “Ah well.” Bird ran his finger cautiously up and down the edge of the folder. “I don’t think I can help you there. Puzzles us all.”
    “Would you agree with what that doctor said? That he didn’t have any close friends?”
    “I wouldn’t know what he got up to in his free time, of course. But if you mean here at Corders… No, I don’t think he did. Most of the people in the section are a good deal older than he was, of course. But he got on with them all right. No friction. I’d know if there was.”
    “Why did they put him in R and D in the first place?”
    “I expect Alec thought we needed some young blood.” Bird looked up and giggled reflectively. “Sorry. I should have chosen my words a bit more carefully there. But he was up to the work all right. I’d soon have had him transferred if he wasn’t. Ah, here’s the coffee.”
    In proper cups and saucers, Dobie noted gratefully; no plastic horrors here. Wendy placed these items on the desk and then retired undulatingly to her own demesne, Dobie’s appreciative attention, however, being this time focused on the whisky bottle that Bird had produced from some hidden recess under the football pitch. “A snifter with it?”
    “Please,” Dobie said. Offers of this kind he rarely felt able to refuse.
    “I reckon we’ve earned it.”
    “The workman is worthy of his hire. What was the nature of his work?”
    “In broad terms?”
    “Yes.”
    “Can’t give you a detailed answer because we’re getting very hot on security these days. But there’s nothing very secret about it. What we’re doing, we’re using laser beams to burn information on to a newly developed kind of magnetic ferrite film, same like in information storage systems. We get the data out again by lower-power laser projection through the film on to a photo-sensing device. Electronic focusing, naturally. Nothing much to it.”
    Dobie tried the coffee, which was excellent. The additive material wasn’t half bad, either. “So where do acoustics come into it?”
    “Well, the information can relate to sound waves as much as to anything else. And since the laser transmits a light wave, of course, you can make the information damned nearly as detailed as you like. In other words—”
    “Compact discs.” Dobie nodded. “Hi-fi.”
    “About the hi-est bloody fi you ever came across. The problem is getting it back into sonics again without using an amplifier the size of this room. That’s what Cantwell was working on. And I think I can tell you that between us we reckon we’ve got it licked.”
    “Did he think so? I mean, was he enthusiastic?”
    “Oh yes. Very. He had to be. Alec’s got no use for anyone who’s not a hundred and ten per cent behind the job and neither have I.”
     
     
     
    Fine. Except it made less sense than ever.
    “I saw Wendy this afternoon. My word, she’s grown.”
    “Wendy?”
    “ You know. Jane’s Wendy.”
    “Oh.” Jenny turned over a page. “At the college, was it?”
    “No, she’s working over at