"Campbell, John W Jr - The Mightiest Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

of a million miles high and a million miles wide darts out, apparently lifting billions of tons of matter hundreds of thousands of miles against a gravitational force ten times as intense as Jupiter's-twenty-five times Earth's.
"But-does it?"
Aarn looked intently at Spencer, and slowly an expression of wonder spread over the engineer's face.
"Good-Heaven! Antigravity!"
"I only guess that, Russ. I don't know. But I want to have your help now. I need your influence to have all the spaceliner captains make observations of a particular nature. And I need the observations of the lunar magnetometer and electrometer coordinated with a set of readings taken on Phobos and on Satellite Nine. If you get me those- And I've another idea."
Aam turned and went on into the Procyon thoughtfully. The workmen who had been patiently waiting for the big boss to get out of the way started streaming through again.
II
IN THE super-patient tone one uses when patience is nigh exhausted, Spencer spoke to the grinning Carlisle: "No. Spelled n-o. It is a syllable of negation, and refers definitely to the fact that that blistering, cockeyed son of an aberrating corkscrew, Aarn, has given me no tiniest bit of information. I gave him all the information he wanted.
"I then asked him for one tiny spark of hope. 'Uhh! That isn't what I hope. That's not so good. Still-maybe-my theory may be wrong, but it may not. No; I don't know, Russ. I'll-' And then the clogged rocket goes wandering off on a triple-focus ellipsoid orbit. I can't find out what he was going to do. He's as noisy as a clam playing hide and seek with his best enemy when he starts thinking. The worst of it is that he won't tell me anything at all."
Don Carlisle grinned again in sympathy. "I heard he was making noises like an oyster, so I came over to see. Whose lab is this, anyway?"
Spencer looked at him reproachfully. "Why bring that up? I pay for it, so naturally I can't get in. Since the Procyon rode out to the Moon and back through the Leonid meteor shower without a dent, the whole shipyard has been so crowded with orders I couldn't turn round quickly, and he's grown a head as big as Jupiter itself. Before this gravity stunt he was working on something else. 'Super-permeable space' he calls it. Something to do with that 'magnetic atmosphere' of his."
"What," asked Carlisle, "is a magnetic atmosphere? I asked him once, and he explained something about a field of high permeability that did something or other to meteors so that they were electrified and so the field of special permeability became impermeable, and the magnet makes the meteors stop and blow up, because they are iron. Now I, in my simple, childish mind, always thought a magnet attracted iron. It seems I was wrong."
Spencer grinned and answered: "It does. Up to a point, that is. What Aarn did was to discover a way of making lines of magnetic force do something-that gives us an isolated north or an isolated south magnetic pole. Also an electric charge. Aarn says that the magnetic lines of force that represent the other pole are turned through ninety degrees in space and become lines of electric force.
"Anyway, he has a single pole magnet, and that proceeds to surround itself with a uniform magnetic field. It does attract iron and nickel and cobalt, of course, but when the metals fall through the magnetic field they have to cut the lines of magnetic force. In doing so they act as electric generators. Electricity is generated in them and heats them. But heat represents energy, and the heat they generate is generated at the expense of their motion.
"The magnetic field is so intense, and their velocity so great at first, that they are heated almost instantaneously to thousands of degrees centigrade and explode into vapor. As vapor they are not dangerous, and nothing larger can get through. Except, of course, the huge things that are too big for the field to handle, but a meteor weighing five hundred pounds is almost as rare as a comet.
"In other words, this magnetic field serves for the space ship just as the Earth's atmosphere does for the planet. It slows the biggest, and stops and utterly destroys the little ones. It is extremely seldom that a meteor gets through our
atmosphere. The magnetic atmosphere is almost equally effective."
"But why will a plain piece of metal, without windings or anything, generate current?" Carlisle objected.
"Say, Car, use your head. That's something you do know -eddy currents-why on that basis, why does a generator generate? Each wire is just a simple piece of metal. You've used the same principle a thousand times. Each electric power meter uses the thing in the control damper disk, the aluminum disk that rotates between the poles of a pair of permanent magnets. Anyway, that's not the important part. The big thing is that Aarn succeeded in making the lines of force lie down around the ship like a sheath instead of standing out like hairs on a frightened cat. It-"
"Hello, boss!" said a deep voice immediately above and behind his left ear. "Won't you come in?"
Spencer rose six inches from his chair in a spasmodic
" jump and turned on Aarn with a sour face. "You misplaced
decimal point, if it weren't for my memories and loyalty
to dear old Mass Tech, I'd amputate you from the pay roll."
"Would you?" asked Aarn, with a pensive air. When pensive, Aarn's broad face and huge body succeeded in looking like a cow of subnormal intelligence, ruminating on the possible source of its next meal. He did now. "I'd hate that, Russ. But I think you'd hate it worst. I got my super-permeable space condition. That's about the poorest name imaginable, so I've decided-to invent a name. Be it hereinafter referred to by the party of the first part as the 'transpon' condition. Anyway, come on in."
Aarn's workship was large and divided into two parts, the apparatus room, inhabited by four technical assistants who made up the apparatus Aarn called for, and Mun-ro's own sanctum.
In Aarn's inner lab were a series of benches and cabinets and tables. These were all loaded with junked apparatus, unused parts, spare voltmeters, and coils of wire. The floor was reserved for the heavier junk that would have crushed the tables.
Spencer was quite surprised to see that one of the largest benches had actually been entirely cleared, and two sets of apparatus set up on it. Aarn smiled his blank.grin again. Spencer knew from sad experience that that smile meant something completely revolutionary that would upset all his calculations and probably cost him, temporarily at least, several million dollars.
"Look," said Aarn.
He waved his hands toward the new apparatus he had set up on the bench. The apparatus consisted of two main groups. At one end of the bench was a squat control panel, backed by a complex assortment of tubes and a device that closely resembled the magnetic atmosphere apparatus connected with a curious wire cone. There was a standard a foot tall surmounted by a cone of copper bars running lengthwise to form the sides and around, binding the longitudinal bars in position.
The tip of the cone was a block of copper, the size of a golf ball. The mouth of the device was some four inches across and the length over all about ten inches. But the copper bars that formed the sides of the cone were carefully insulated from the block that was at the tip. From this block, a single straight bar of copper projected along the axis of the cone.
Aarn smiled and turned on the apparatus. A low, musical hum rose from the tubes and coils, and slowly a faint blue glow centered about the copper block at the tip of the cone and the pencil of metal that extended up the axis/ For five seconds this held" steady while a similar blue glow
began to build up about the outer system of copper conductors. Presently, as this reached a maximum, the inner glow began to fade, then swiftly a pulsing rhythm was set up, first the inner, then the outer conductor system glowing more intensely. The light settled down to a steady flickering that the eye could barely perceive, and Aam smiled at it thoughtfully.
"The apparatus takes a few minutes to warm up. That's the first half. That was the hardest part, too, curiously, though this projector here is a far more important discovery." Aarn pushed a second standard into view, which was surmounted by a metal bowl that closely resembled a deep soup dish. The inner surface was evidently a parabolic one, made up of a maze of tiny coils, each oriented carefully toward some definite aim, while the entire rim of the "soup dish" was a single larger coil.
Carefully Aarn adjusted it so that it pointed toward the nickering cage of copper wires, and beyond it to the apparatus at the other end of the bench. This apparatus seemed fairly simple, merely a number of standards with various arrangements of wires. Two parallel copper bars, a double spiral made of two insulated wires, two metal disks. "Those," said Aarn softly, "are simply connected with the normal power supply. It is alternating current of sixty cycles at two hundred and twenty volts. The device I have is a pickup. It will collect the power from those wires. The projector here is the real secret-it makes space itself become a perfect conductor of electric-space-strain. Not electricity. Electric-space-strain. But the result is the same. It makes the space along its axis capable of carrying power along the axis-and along the axis only. When I start this, the space between here and that interrupter coil back there will become a perfect conductor. The interrupter coil is necessary to prevent the thing reaching on, out indefinitely.
"The pick-up there, will be in that path of conduction, and so will the first of those lead-offs there. That pair of straight wires. The wires will not be mutually short circuited because this will conduct current only along the axis. But the pick-up there keeps sending out flashes of a somewhat similar energy at an angle so that it covers the entire column, and so can pick up the power in it.
"I can't make that pick-up work continuously, because the energies would then interfere and simply short-circuit things. But I can make it work at any frequency from one cycle a second to about fifty megacycles. Now I'm going to adjust it to sixty cycles, and it will get in step with the power on the two leads-and run that -series of lights and that motor."
Aarn pushed a switch. Instantly three tumblers snapped over automatically, a powerful surge of power seemed to draw at the men themselves momentarily, and then the little flickering pick-up was sending out searchlight beams of brilliant ionization. They started out along the shape of the cone, spread rapidly, till they filled the tight, round column of power coming from the transpon condition projector, then the ionization stretched along like a luminous liquid flower in a pipe.
"The thing isn't in phase-wasting a lot of power," said Aarn.
He began adjusting a dial, and the slight visible flickering vanished as the frequency rose. Suddenly the ionization all but vanished, leaving only a slight glow about the pickup itself. Then an instant later it was back, but vanished again. Each time the ionization stopped, the lights glowed, and the motor Aarn had pointed out hummed into speed.
Presently he had it exactly adjusted, and the lights burned steadily, the five horse-power motor continuing smoothly.
"The efficiency is about seventy-five per cent, which is not very good, I'll admit-but good enough for what I have in mind."
Spencer was looking at the device intently. At last he asked: "But why doesn't the pick-up short-circuit the thing when it has thrown out its pick-up force? It throws a conducting band or disk completely across the tube of the transpon beam, as you said you called it. That will carry current at right angles to the axis, so it lies completely across the two terminals of the wires."
Aarn smiled grimly. "That, Russ, is why I took nearly nine months to do this. I had to prevent that. The answer is that the lock and the grid don't project the same force. The grid projects a force which will accept only a negative electric force, while the block will accept only positive. Therefore it can't short-circuit."
"Then it rectifies, too? Some little device! It's a thing we've sought for a century, Arn-power broadcast along a beam."
"No," said Aarn sharply. "That's the point-it isn't broadcast along a beam. A beam reaches out and picks it up. The difference is as great and as vital as "the difference between being hit aiid stopping something going by. If a man's fist connects with the button, your jaw absorbs kinetic energy. He has broadcast it along the beam of his arm.
"But if you reach out and grab hold of a man running by you, you have reached out for and taken hold of a source of kinetic energy and momentum. Right?"
"Hm-hum! Distinct difference. But why does it count here? What difference does it make?"
"Nut-a system of difference. No beam any man ever made could hold an absolute beam-a fixed diameter from here to infinity. Any power beam you make has to carry so much power per square-inch cross section at the point where
the power is picked up. Suppose I'm sending power to a ship going to the Moon. On Earth the beam is ten feet across. Fine, the ship has an absorber or pick-up twenty feet in diameter, let's say. When the ship is fifty miles up, the beam and the pick-up are the same size. At one hundred miles the beam is wasting seventy-five per cent of its power because it has to maintain a certain power at the ship, and only twenty-five per cent of the beam is impinging on the target.