Высокие технологии в современной англоязычной литературе. Часть IV. Методические указания для бакалавров и специалистов 1-2 курсов всех отделений и на
.pdfindustrial, rubber work gloves. Use insulated tools or, even better, a hot stick. They're fiberglass, like hockey sticks, with tools attached to the end. We use them for working live lines.
"Protect yourself," he repeated. "Remember the path-of-least-resistance rule. Human skin is a pretty poor conductor if it's dry. If it's wet, especially with sweat, because of the salt, resistance drops dramatically. And if you've got a wound or a burn, skin becomes a great conductor. Dry leather soles of your shoes are fairly good insulators. Wet leather's like skin-especially if you're standing on a conductive surface like damp ground or a basement floor. Puddles of water? Uhoh.
"So, if you have to touch something that could be live-say, opening a metal door-make sure you're dry and wearing insulated shoes or boots. Use a hot stick or an insulated tool if you can and use only one hand-your right since it's slightly farther from the heart-and keep your other hand in your pocket so you don't touch anything accidentally and complete a circuit. Watch where you put your feet.
"You've seen birds sitting on uninsulated high-tension wires? They don't wear PPE. How can they roost on a piece of metal carrying a hundred thousand volts? Why don't we have roast pigeons falling from the skies?"
"They don't touch the other wire."
"Exactly. As long as they don't touch a return or the tower, they're fine. They have the same charge as the wire, but there's no current-no amps-going through them. You've got to be like that bird on the wire."
Which, to Sachs, made her sound pretty damn fragile.
"Take off all metal before you work with juice. Jewelry especially. Pure silver is the best conductor on earth. Copper and aluminum are at the top too. Gold isn't far behind. At the other end are the dielectrics-insulators. Glass and Teflon, then ceramic, plastics, rubber, wood. Bad conductors. Standing on something like that, even a thin piece, could mean the difference between life and death.
"That's rule number two, protection." Sommers continued, "Finally, rule three: If you can't avoid juice and can't protect yourself against it, cut its head off. All
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circuits, big or small, have a way to shut them down. They all have switches, they all have breakers or fuses. You can stop the juice instantly by flipping the switch or the breaker off, or removing a fuse. And you don't even need to know where the breaker is to pop it. What happens if you stick two pieces of wire into the holes in a household outlet and touch the ends?"
"The circuit breaker pops."
"Exactly. You can do the same thing with any circuit. But remember rule number two. Protect yourself when you do that. Because at bigger voltages touching the two wires will produce one hell of a spark and it could be an arc flash."
Sommers was on to another junk food course, pretzels. He washed down the noisy bite with more soda. "I could go on for an hour but those're the basics. You get the message?"
"I do. This's really helpful, Charlie. I appreciate it."
His advice sounded so simple but, though Sachs had carefully listened to everything Sommers had told her, she couldn't escape the fact that this particular weapon was still very alien to her.
How could Luis Martin have avoided it, protected himself against it or cut the beast's head off? The answer was, he couldn't.
"If you need me for anything else technical, just give me a call." He gave her two cell phone numbers. "And, oh, hold on… Here." He handed her a black plastic box with a button on the side and an LCD screen at the top. It looked like an elongated cell phone. "One of my inventions. A noncontact current detector. Most of them only register up to a thousand volts and you have to be pretty close to the wire or terminal for it to read. But this goes to ten thousand. And it's very sensitive. It'll sense voltage from about four or five feet away and give you the level."
"Thanks. That'll be helpful." She gave a laugh, examining the instrument. "Too bad they don't make these to tell you if a guy on the street's carrying a gun."
Sachs had been joking. But Charlie Sommers was nodding, a glaze of concentration on his face; he seemed to be considering her words very seriously.
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As he said good-bye to her, he shoved some corn chips into his mouth and frantically began drawing a diagram on a slip of paper. She noticed that a napkin was the first thing he'd grabbed.
Task 30
Write the theses of the text.
Text 12
Task 31
Read the following extracts; organize them in correct order.
Deaver J. The Burning wire.- L.: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 2011.-P.144- 146,173-175,206-208
a) Sachs admitted that she missed her most recent car, a Chevy Camaro SS, the one she and her father had worked on together. It had been a victim of the perp in a recent case. But her father had reminded her it wasn't wise to put too much person into your car. It was part of you, but it wasn't you. And it wasn't your child or your best friend. The rods, wheels, the cylinders, the drums, the tricky electronics could turn indifferent or lazy and strand you. They could also betray and kill you, and if you thought the conglomeration of steel and plastic and copper and aluminum cared, you were wrong.
Amie, a car has only the soul you put into it. No more and no less. And never forget that.
So, yes, she regretted the loss of her Camaro and always would. But she now drove a fine vehicle that suited her. And that, incongruously, sported as a steering wheel ornament the Camaro's insignia, a present from Pammy, who'd removed it reverently from the Chevy's corpse for Sachs to mount on the Ford.
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Pound on the brake for the intersection, heel-toe downshift to rev match, check left, check right, clutch out and rip up through the gears. The speedometer hit fifty. Then kissed sixty, seventy. The blue light on the dashboard, which she hardly even saw, flashed as fast as a pounding heart.
Sachs was presently on the West Side Highway, venerable Route 9A, having made the transition from the Henry Hudson several miles behind her. Heading south, she streaked past familiar sights, the helipad, Hudson River Park, the yacht docks and the tangled entrance to the Holland Tunnel. Then with the financial center buildings on her right, she hurried on past the massive construction site where the towers had been, aware even at this frantic time that if ever a void could cast a shadow it was here.
A controlled skid angled the Cobra onto Battery Place, and Sachs flew east into the warren of lower Manhattan.
She had the tip of the ear bud inserted and a crackling sound interrupted her concentration as she deftly skidded around two cabs, noting the shocked expression below the Sikh's turban.
"Sachs!"
"What, Rhyme?" "Where are you?" "Almost there."
She lost rubber on all four tires as she made a ninety-degree turn and inserted the Ford between curb and car, one needle never below 45, the other never below 5,000.
She was making for Whitehall Street. Near Stone. Rhyme had had a conversation with Charlie Sommers, and it had yielded unexpected results. The Special Projects man had speculated that Galt might try something other than an arc flash; Sommers was betting the man would simply try to electrify a public area with enough voltage to kill passersby. He'd turn them into part of the circuit and run juice through them somehow. It was easier and more efficient, the man had explained, and you didn't need nearly as much voltage.
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Rhyme had concluded that the fire in the uptown substation was really a distraction to keep them focused away from Galt's attack on the real location: probably downtown. He'd looked over the list of lava and volcano exhibits, and found the one that was the farthest away from Harlem, where everybody was looking: Amsterdam College. It was a community college specializing in office skills and associate degrees in the business professions. But their liberal arts division was having a show on geologic formations, including an exhibit about volcanoes.
"I'm here, Rhyme." Sachs skidded the Torino to a stop in front of the school, leaving twin tails of black on the gray asphalt. She was out of the car before the tire smoke from the wheel wells had dissipated. The smell ominously reminded her of Algonquin substation MH-10… and though she tried to avoid it, a repeat image of the black-and-red dots in the body of Luis Martin. As she jogged toward the school's entrance, she was, for once, thankful that a jolt of arthritic pain shot through her knees, partially taking her attention off the harsh memories.
"I'm looking the place over, Rhyme. It's big. Bigger than I expected." Sachs wasn't searching a scene so she'd foregone the video uplink.
"You've got eighteen minutes until the deadline."
She scanned the six-story community college, from which students, professors and staff were leaving, quickly, uneasiness on their faces. Tucker McDaniel and Lon Sellitto had decided to evacuate the place. They hurried outside, clutching purses and computers and books, and moved away from the building. Almost everyone looked up at one point in their exodus.
b) Electricity keeps US alive; the impulse from the brain to the heart and lungs is a current like any other.
And electricity kills too.
At 9 p.m., just nine and a half hours after the attack at Algonquin substation MH-10, the man in the dark-blue Algonquin Consolidated overalls surveyed the scene in front of him: his killing zone.
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Electricity and death…
He was standing in a construction site, out in the open, but no one paid him any attention because he was a worker among fellow workers. Different uniforms, different hard hats, different companies. But one thing tied them all together: Those who made a living with their hands were looked down on by "real people," the ones who relied on their services, the rich, the comfortable, the ungrateful.
Safe in this invisibility, he was in the process of installing a much more powerful version of the device he'd tested earlier at the health club. In the nomenclature of electrical service, "high voltage" didn't begin until you hit 70,000v. For what he had planned, he needed to be sure all the systems could handle at least two or three times that much juice.
He looked over the site of tomorrow's attack one more time. As he did he couldn't help but think about voltage and amperage… and death.
There'd been a lot of misreporting about Ben Franklin and that insane key-in- the-thunderstorm thing. Actually Franklin had stayed completely off damp ground, in a barn, and was connected to the wet kite string with a dry silk ribbon. The kite itself was never actually struck by lightning; it simply picked up static discharge from a gathering storm. The result wasn't a real bolt but rather elegant blue sparks that danced from the back of Franklin's hand like fish feeding at the surface of a lake.
One European scientist duplicated the experiment not long afterward. He didn't survive.
From the earliest days of power generation, workers were constantly being burned to death or having their hearts switched off. The early grid took down a number of horses, thanks to metal shoes on wet cobblestones.
Thomas Alva Edison and his famous assistant Nikola Tesla battled constantly over the superiority of DC, direct current (Edison), versus AC, alternating current (Tesla), trying to sway the public by horror stories of danger. The conflict became known as the Battle of the Currents and it made front-page news regularly. Edison constantly played the electrocution card, warning that anyone using AC was in
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danger of dying and in a very unpleasant way. It was true that it took less AC current to cause injury, though any type of current powerful enough to be useful could also kill you.
The first electric chair was built by an employee of Edison's, rather tactically using Tesla's alternating current. The first execution via the device was in 1890, under the direction not of an executioner but a "state electrician." The prisoner did die, though the process took eight minutes. At least he was probably unconscious by the time he caught fire.
And then there were always stun guns. Depending on who was getting shot and in what part of the body, they could be counted on for the occasional death. And the fear of everyone in the industry: arc flashes, of course, like the attack he'd engineered this morning.
Juice and death…
He wandered through the construction site, feigning end-of-day weariness. The site was now staffed by a skeleton crew of night-shift workers. He moved closer, and still no one noticed him. He was wearing thick-framed safety glasses, the yellow Algonquin hard hat. He was as invisible as electricity in a wire.
The first attack had made the news in a big way, of course, though the stories were limited to an "incident" in a Midtown substation. The reporters were abuzz with talk of short circuits, sparks and temporary power outages. There was a lot of speculation about terrorists but no one had found any connection.
Yet.
At some point, somebody would have to consider the possibility of an Algonquin Power worker running around rigging traps that resulted in very, very unpleasant and painful deaths, but that hadn't happened.
He now left the construction site and made his way underground, still unchallenged. The uniform and the ID badge were like magic keys. He slipped into another grimy, hot access tunnel and, after donning personal protective gear, continued to rig the wiring.
Juice and death.
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How elegant it was to take a life this way, compared, say, with shooting your victim at five hundred yards.
It was so pure and so simple and so natural.
You could stop electricity, you could direct it. But you couldn't trick it. Once juice was created it would instinctively do whatever it could to return to the earth, and if the most direct way was to take a human life in the process, it would do so in, literally, a flash.
Juice had no conscience, felt no guilt.
This was one of the things he'd come to admire about his weapon. Unlike human beings, electricity was forever true to its nature.
c) Mel Cooper and Rhyme were working on the analysis of the letter. Ron Pulaski had arrived too, a few minutes earlier. Lon Sellitto was speeding downtown to coordinate with ESU, in the event they could either ID a suspect or find his possible target.
Tucker McDaniel looked over the demand letter as if it were some type of food he'd never encountered. Rhyme supposed this was because handwriting on a piece of paper didn't fall into cloud zone law enforcement. It was the antithesis of hightech communications. His computers and sophisticated tracing systems were useless against paper and ink.
Rhyme glanced at the script. He knew from his own training, as well as from working with Parker Kincaid, that handwriting doesn't reveal anything about the personality of the writer, whatever the grocery store checkout-stand books and news pundits suggested. Analysis could be illuminating, of course, if you had another, identified sample to compare it with, so you could determine if the writer of the second document was the same as the one who wrote the first. Parker Kincaid would be doing this now, running a preliminary comparison with known handwriting samples of terror suspects and comparing them with the writing of those Algonquin employees who were on the company list.
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Handwriting and content could also suggest rightor left-handedness, level of education, national and regional upbringing, mental and physical illnesses and intoxication or drug-impaired states.
But Rhyme's interest in the note was more basic: the source of the paper, source of the ink, the fingerprints and trace embedded in the fibers.
All of which, after Cooper's diligent analysis, added up to a big fat nothing. The sources for both paper stock and ink were generic-they could have come
from one of thousands of stores. Andi Jessen's prints were the only ones on the letter and those on the envelope were from the messenger and the doorman; McDaniel's agents had taken samples of their prints and forwarded them to Rhyme.
Useless, Rhyme reflected bitterly. The only deduction was that the perp was smart. And had a great sense of survival.
But ten minutes later, they had a breakthrough, of sorts.
Parker Kincaid was on the line from his document examination office in his house in Fairfax, Virginia.
"Lincoln."
"Parker, what've we got?"
Kincaid said, "First, the handwriting comparison. The control samples from Algonquin itself were pretty sparse, so I couldn't do the complete analysis I would have liked."
"I understand that."
"But I've narrowed it down to twelve employees." "Twelve. Excellent."
"Here are the names. Ready?"
Rhyme glanced at Cooper, who nodded. The tech jotted them down as Kincaid dictated.
"Now, I can give you a few other things about him. First, he's right-handed. Then I picked some characteristics from the language and word choice."
"Go ahead."
At Rhyme's nod, Cooper walked to the profile board.
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"He's a product of high school and probably some college. And it was an American education. There are a few spelling, grammatical and punctuation mistakes but mostly with more difficult words or constructions. I put those down to the stress of what he's doing. He was probably born here. I can't say for sure that he isn't of foreign extraction, but English is his first and, I'm almost positive, only language."
Cooper wrote this down.
Kincaid continued, "He's also pretty clever. He doesn't write in the first person and avoids the active voice."
Rhyme understood. "He never says anything about himself." "Exactly."
"Suggesting there could be others working with him."
"It's a possibility. Also, there's some variation on ascenders and descenders. You get that when a subject is upset, emotional. They're writing in anger or distress, and broader strokes tend to be emphasized."
"Good." Rhyme nodded at Cooper, who jotted this too onto the profile board. "Thanks, Parker. We'll get to work."
They disconnected. "Twelve…" Rhyme sighed. He looked over the evidence and profile chart, then the names of the suspects. "Don't we have any way to narrow it down faster?" he asked bitterly, watching his clock advance one more minute toward the approaching deadline.
Task 32
Read the received text and write its summary.
Text 13
Task 33
Read the text and compare it with texts 9-12. What do they have in common?
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