Высокие технологии в современной англоязычной литературе. Часть IV. Методические указания для бакалавров и специалистов 1-2 курсов всех отделений и на
.pdfwith stoplights out. Elevators would be frozen. There'd be panic. Muggings and looting and rapes invariably rose during a blackout, even in daylight.
Electricity keeps people honest.
"Sir?" the technician asked desperately.
The supervisor stared at the moving voltage indicator bars. He grabbed his own phone and called his superior, a senior vice president at Algonquin. "Herb, we have a situation." He briefed the man.
"How'd this happen?"
"We don't know. I'm thinking terrorists." "God. You called Homeland Security?"
"Yeah, just now. Mostly we're trying to get more power into the affected areas. We're not having much luck."
He watched the indicator bars continue to rise through the red.
The vice president asked, "Okay. Recommendations?"
"We don't have much choice. Shed load."
"A good chunk of the city'll go black for at least a day."
"But I don't see any other options. With that much juice flowing in, the station'll blow if we don't do something."
His boss thought for a moment. "There's a second transmission line running through Manhattan-Ten, right?"
The supervisor looked up at the board. A high-voltage cable went through the substation and headed west to deliver juice to parts of New Jersey. "Yes, but it's not online. It's just running through a duct there."
"But could you splice into it and use that for supply to the diverted lines?"
"Manually?… I suppose, but… but that would mean getting people inside MHTen. And if we can't hold the juice back until they're finished, it'll flash. That'll kill 'em all. Or give 'em third-degrees over their entire bodies."
A pause. "Hold on. I'm calling Jessen."
Algonquin Consolidated's CEO. Also known, privately, as "The All-Powerful."
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As he waited, the supervisor stared at the techs surrounding him. He kept staring at the board too. The glowing red dots.
Critical failure…
Finally the supervisor's boss came back on. His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and after a moment said, "You're supposed to send some people in. Manually splice into the line."
"That's what Jessen said?" Another pause. "Yes."
The supervisor whispered, "I can't order anybody in there. It's suicide."
"Then find some volunteers. Jessen said you are not, understand me, not to shed load under any circumstances."
Task 24
Find the endings of the following sentences. Translate them into Russian.
1.The large room was brightly lit…
2.In one tiny portion of the spaghetti…
3.And because New York City demanded a lot of…
4.The computer program wasn‘t doing…
5.A third red dot…
6.The temperature of the electric wires…
7.As soon as the tech was able
8.The circuit breakers would pop…
9.But before that happened…
10.Also known as…
11.The damage to computers alone…
12.He grabbed his own phone…
13.A high-voltage cable went…
14.And if we can‘t hold…
15.Jessen said you are not…
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Task 25
Complete a plan of the text. Retell it.
Text 10
Task 26
Read the following text and give its main idea.
Deaver J. The Burning wire.- L.: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 2011.-P.68-70
The politics had changed drastically during his father's lifetime-the death of communism, the wounding of racial segregation, the birth of nonstate enemies. Computers replaced typewriters and the library. Cars had airbags. TV channels propagated from four-plus UHF-to hundreds. But very little about the man's lifestyle had altered in a core way. The elder Dellray thrived in his enclosed world of academia, specifically philosophy, and oh, how he had wanted his son to settle there too, examining the nature of existence and the human condition. He'd tried to fill his son with a love of the same.
To some extent he was successful. Questioning, brilliant, discerning young Fred did indeed develop a fascination with humankind in all its incarnations: metaphysics, psychology, theology, epistemology, ethics, and politics. He loved it all. But it took only one month as a graduate assistant to realize he'd go mad if he didn't put his talents to practical use.
And never one to pull back, he sought out the rawest and most intense practical application of philosophy he could think of.
He joined the FBI.
Change…
His father reconciled himself to his son's apostasy and they enjoyed coffee and long walks in Prospect Park, during which they came to understand that, although
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their laboratories and techniques were different, their outlooks and insights were not.
The human condition… observed and written about by the father and experienced firsthand by the son.
In the unlikely form of undercover work. Fred's intense curiosity about and insights into the nature of life made him a natural Everyman. Unlike most undercover cops, with their limited acting skills and repertoires, Dellray could truly become the people he played.
Once, when Dellray was in disguise as a homeless man on the streets of New York, not far from the Federal Building, the then assistant special agent in charge of the Manhattan office of the FBI-Dellray's boss, in effect-walked right past and dropped a quarter into his cup, never recognizing him.
One of the best compliments Dellray ever received.
A chameleon. One week, a scorched-brain tweaker desperate for meth. The next a South African envoy with nuclear secrets to sell. Then a Somalian imam's lieutenant, lugging around a hatred of America and a hundred quotations from the Koran.
He owned dozens of outfits, purchased or hacked together by himself, which now clogged the basement of the townhouse he and Serena had bought a few years ago in BK-Brooklyn. He'd advanced in his career, which was inevitable for someone with his drive, skill and absolute lack of desire to stab fellow workers in the back. Now Dellray primarily ran other undercover FBI agents and civilian confidential informants-AKA snitches-though he still got into the field occasionally. And loved it just as much as he ever had.
But then came the change.
Cloud zone…
Dellray didn't deny that both the good guys and the bad guys were getting smarter and more tech-savvy. The shift was obvious: HUMINT-the fruits of intelligence gathering from human-to-human contact-was giving way to SIGINT.
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But it was a phenomenon that Dellray simply wasn't comfortable with. In her youth Serena had tried to be a torch singer. She was a natural at all forms of dance, from ballet to jazz to modern, but she just didn't have the skill to sing. Dellray was the same with the new law enforcement of data, numbers, technology.
He kept running his snitches and he kept going undercover himself, and getting results. But with McDaniel and his T and A team-oh, 'scuse me, Tucker-his Tech and Com team, old-school Dellray was feeling, well, old. The ASAC was sharp, a hard worker-putting in sixty-hour work weeks-and an infighter; he'd stand up for his agents against the President if he needed to. And his techniques had worked; last month McDaniel's people had picked up sufficient details from encrypted satellite phone calls to pinpoint a fundamentalist cell outside Milwaukee.
The message to Dellray and the older agents was clear: Your time's passing. He still stung from the dig, possibly inadvertent, delivered at the meeting in
Rhyme's lab:
Well, keep at it, Fred. You're doing a good job…
Meaning, I didn't even expect you to come up with any leads to Justice For and Rahman.
Maybe McDaniel was right to criticize. After all, Dellray had as good a network of CIs in place as you could hope for to track terrorist activities. He met with them regularly. He worked them all hard, doling out protection to the fearful, Kleenex to the wet-eyed guilty, cash to the ones who informed as a livelihood and painful squeezes to the shoulders and psyches of those who'd gotten, as Dellray's grandmother said, too big for their britches.
But of all the information he'd gathered about terrorist plots, even embryonic ones, there'd been nothing about Rahman's Justice For or about a big fucking spark.
And here McDaniel's people had made an ID and defined a real threat by sitting on their asses.
Like the drones in the Middle East and Afghanistan? You know the pilots are next to a strip mall in Colorado Springs or Omaha…
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Dellray had another concern too, one that had arisen around the same time as youthful McDaniel appeared: Maybe he just wasn't as good as he used to be.
Rahman might've been right under his nose. Cell members in Justice For might've been studying electrical engineering in BK or New Jersey the same way the Nine-Eleven hijackers had studied flying.
Task 27
What is
UHF;
FBI;
Everyman;
AKA;
HUMINT;
SIGINT;
T and A;
Tucker;
ASAC;
CI;
Justice For;
Rahman;
Kleenex ?
Task 28
Read the text again and give its summary.
Text 11
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Task 29
Read the text and answer the following questions:
1.What is Sommers?
2.What was a young woman buying?
3.Whom was Sommers going after?
4.What was an electric circuit compared to?
5.How much amperage does it take to kill a person?
6.Why is electricity like Frankenstein‘s monster?
7.What are the three rules for dealing with juice?
Deaver J. The Burning wire.- L.: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 2011.-P.133-138
Sommers laughed. "Great job title, hm? Those're supervisors who arrange for the repairs when a line goes down or there's a short circuit or other problem. And remember that a lot of the senior people here have risen through the ranks. Just because they do energy brokerage now and sit behind a desk doesn't mean they can't rewire a three-phase service panel in their sleep."
"And make an arc flash gun."
"Exactly. So you should be looking for somebody with computer training in Unix control and energy management programs. And somebody with a career as a lineman or troubleman or in the contracting trades. Military too. Army, navy and air force produce a lot of electricians."
"Appreciate this."
A knocking on the door frame intruded. A young woman stood there with a large Redweld expanding envelope in her arms. "Ms. Jessen said you wanted these? From Human Resources?"
Sachs took the resumes and employee files and thanked the woman.
Sommers had dessert, a Hostess cupcake. Then its twin. He sipped more soda. "Want to say something."
She lifted an eyebrow.
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"Can I give you a lecture?" "Lecture?"
"Safety lecture."
"I don't have much time."
"It'll be quick. But it's important. I was just thinking, you're at a big disadvantage, going after this… what'd you call him?"
"We say 'perp.' For 'Perpetrator.' "
" 'Perp' sounds sexier. Say you're going after your usual perp. Bank robbers, hitmen… You know that they might have a gun or knife. You're used to that. You know how to protect yourself. You've got procedures on how to handle them. But electricity as a weapon or a booby trap… whole different ball game. The thing about juice? It's invisible. And it's all over the place. I mean, everywhere."
She was recalling the bits of hot metal. The horrid round holes in Luis Martin's tan skin.
Sachs had a scent memory of the scorch at the crime scene. She shivered in disgust.
Sommers gestured toward a sign on his wall.
REMEMBER NATIONAL FIRE PROTECTION
ASSOCIATION GUIDELINE 70.
READ IT, LEARN IT.
NFPA 70 CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE!
She felt an urgency to get on with the case but she also wanted to hear what he had to say. "I don't have much time, but please, go ahead."
"First, you have to know how dangerous electricity is. And that means knowing about amperage, or current. You know what that is?"
"I…" Sachs had thought she did, until she realized she couldn't define it. "No."
"Let's compare an electric circuit to a plumbing system: water pumped through pipes. Water pressure is created by the pump, which moves a certain amount of
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water through the pipes at a certain speed. It moves more or less easily depending on the width and condition of the pipes.
"Now, in an electrical system, it's the same thing. Except you have electrons instead of water, wires or some conductive material instead of pipes and a generator or battery instead of the pump. The pressure pushing the electrons is the voltage. The amount of electrons moving through the wire is the amps, or current. The resistance-called ohms-is determined by the width and nature of the wires or whatever the electrons're flowing through."
So far, so good. "That makes sense. Never heard it put that way before." "Now we're talking about amps. Remember: the amount of moving electrons." "Good."
"How much amperage does it take to kill you? At a hundred milliamps of AC current, your heart will fibrillate and you'll die. That's one tenth of one amp. Your typical Rite Aid hair dryer pulls ten amps."
"Ten?" Sachs whispered.
"Yes, ma'am. A hair dryer. Ten amps, which, by the way, is all you need for an electric chair."
As if she weren't uneasy enough.
He continued, "Electricity is like Frankenstein's monster-who was animated with lightning, by the way. It's stupid and it's brilliant. Stupid because once it's created it wants to do only one thing: Get back to the ground. Brilliant because it instinctively knows the best way to do that. It always takes the path of least resistance. You can grab on to a hundred-thousand-volt line but if it's easier for the electricity to get back through the wire, you're perfectly safe. If you're the best conductor to the ground…" His pointed nod explained the consequences.
"Now, for your lesson. My three rules for dealing with juice: First, avoid it if at all possible. This guy is going to know you're after him and he might be rigging traps with live lines. Stay away from metal-handrails, doors and doorknobs, uncarpeted flooring, appliances, machinery. Wet basements, standing water. Have you ever seen transformers and switchgear on the street?"
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"No."
"Yes, you have. But you're not aware of them because our city fathers hide and disguise them. The working parts of transformers're scary and ugly. In the city, they're underground or in innocuous buildings or neutral-painted enclosures. You could be standing right next to a transformer taking in thirteen thousand volts and not know it. So keep an eye out for anything that says Algonquin on it. And stay away if you can.
"Now, you have to remember that even if you think you're avoiding it, you could still be in danger. There's something called 'islanding.' "
"Islanding?"
"Say the grid is down in some part of town, like happened today. You think all the circuits're dead, right? Of course you're safe. Well, maybe and maybe not. Andi Jessen would like Algonquin to be the only game in town, but we're not. Power nowadays is supplied through what's called distributed generation, where smaller energy producers pump juice into our grid. Islanding would happen when the Algonquin supply is offline but some smaller source is still supplying juice to the grid-an island of electricity in the void.
"Then there's backfeed. You cut the breakers on a line and go to work. But the low-voltage lines downstream may start feeding juice back into the transformer-"
Sachs understood. "And the transformer steps it back up." "Exactly. And the line you thought was dead is alive. Really alive." "With enough juice to hurt you."
"Oh, yeah. And then there's induction. Even if you're sure you shut off the circuits-it's completely dead, and there's no islanding or backfeed possible-the wire you're working on can still become charged again with deadly voltage if there's another live wire nearby. That's because of induction. The current in one wire can energize another, even a dead one, if it's close enough.
"So, rule one: Avoid the juice. What's rule two? If you can't avoid it, protect yourself against it. Wear PPE, personal protective equipment. Rubber boots and gloves and not those sissy little ones they wear on that CSI TV show. Thick,
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