"Campbell, John W Jr - The Mightiest Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)
"Slightly," agreed Spencer with a smile. "So hereafter, ships won't carry accumulators, eh? Just send back a beam and pick up power from Earth. But say-how are they going to be made to pay for it? They could tap any power source or any line on Earth?"
Aarn smiled and replied: "In the first place, they won't get their power from Earth, and in the second place, just suppose you sent back one of the beams to tap any sixty-cycle line on Earth. What would happen? First, you'd have to get in phase with some One of the big power-line networks. Then, bingo, you have everything from one hundred and ten to one hundred and ten thousand and above volts coming smashing along. It would blow you to kingdom come and wreck the apparatus. Might do some damage back on Earth, but I doubt it."
"Not get the power from Earth? Where then? Not from one of the other planets surely, because they have power troubles of their own."
"From the mightiest machine!"
"Good Heaven! The Sun! Do you mean that thing could tap the awful power of the Sun?"
Spencer's face was suddenly pale. He could visualize that beam as though a visible thing reaching from some tiny dust mote out across space to impinge on the Sun, and drink of the power in that million-mile electric furnace, where matter was smashed beyond atoms, ground to radiation.
"The Sun," Aarn nodded. "It's hard to think of all at once. Tapping the-mightiest machine-the most inconceivably huge engine in the universe really-for any star would do. Making a star supply your power. A furnace that consumes nearly four million tons of matter a second.
"It's simple really. You need a power stack, of course- a huge supply of power storage to operate your machine when you were not in position to tap the Sun. It would require only a modification of this device-one I have worked out completely-and we could draw a billion billion horse power in direct current at any voltage you wished, up to a maximum of about five hundred million, which would make insulation impossible in any circumstances."
"Then-unlimited power-and I thought-it was just a new power-transmission device. Atomic energy! Man could never build-of course he couldn't make one as big-a sun -two million million million tons of engine-three hundred thousand worlds like this-"
He laughed suddenly. "Car, you wanted to'know why physics didn't give you the atomic energy they promised. Here's physics' answer! Atomic energy would be too expensive-require too elaborate a control-so physics taps a sun!"
Ill
"THAT," SAID Aarn quietly, "is one of the things I promised. Now that we have the power I promised, I think I can also promise the antigravity device."
"Antigravity, too! Say, Aarn, there won't be anything left to find after you get through with physics. But can you? How-"
"The Sun gave that secret, too. It is because the terrific forces beneath the surface cut off the gravity that those huge masses of matter can be ejected to form prominences. I was right-and the data that men out in space collected gave me the necessary basis for my problem's solution.
"Look-for a century or more men have known that there were three types of space-strain energy fields. There is the electric-energy field and the magnetic-energy field, which are mutually at right angles to each other. My 'magnetic atmosphere' device simply turns half of the magnetic field through ninety degrees and makes it an electric instead of a magnetic field pole. That was simple.
"But-gravity has no poles. Gravity is fourth dimensional instead of in three dimensions. I found out the answer, thanks to the Sun. Remember, it takes a three-dimensional thing to have two different types of stresses. Take a rubber balloon as an example. The rubber can be dented inward. A strain along the diameter of the sphere. But the rubber becomes stretched on one side and more or less piled up on the other. Those two types of stress are at exactly ninety-degree angles. That represents magnetism and electric field.
"Obviously, if we dent the balloon inward in one place, it will stretch outward somewhere else to make up for it, perhaps all over, but a swelling takes place. That represents the fact that a north pole is always associated with a south pole, somewhere or other. If the fabric is stretched along its surface, it is thinner in one place, but inevitably piles up elsewhere. Where there is a positive pole there is necessarily an accumulation of negative, somewhere.
"But our rather poor illustration doesn't explain just how the ninety-degree twist is possible except generally in that, if the balloon is dented, if the fabric stretches, there is no actual dent outward. Our model is poor, because space is four dimensional.
"But you see that it requires a three-dimensional medium for two stresses at right angles to each other. It requires four for three right-angle forces. And the curious thing about that four-dimensional stress is that it doesn't have polarity necessarily. But there is a -reverse condition. In magnetic and electric fields, opposites attract. In gravity likes attract That is characteristic. Opposites repel.
"I can make the gravity curvature-given energy enough. I can also make the reverse curvature of space. But before I can reverse curvature of space locally, I have to iron out the normally present gravitational curvature. Any space strain is energy. It requires enormous energy."
Aarn got off the bench where he had been sitting, and started clearing away his last demonstration rapidly, setting up a new group of apparatus.
"Suppose we wanted to free a mass of gravity. To flatten out the local gravity, we have to overcome its own gravity. You know the old lines-of-force picture of magnetism, Spence. You can use that lines-of-force idea on any of the three space fields. In the gravitational picture, it works something like this: the attraction of the Earth for a small body, like
this lead weight, for instance, is equaled, of course, by the attraction of the small body for the Earth. If you think of it as lines of force, picture the lines about a small piece of iron in the field of a powerful magnet. The magnetic lines of force bend into and pass through the piece of iron.
"Suppose we wanted to wrap a coil of wire around that bit of iron, and make it 'magnetic-weightless,' so to speak. We would have to build up a magnetic force in our coil that opposed the greater magnetic field and bent the magnetic lines of force away. Then really, in demagnetizing our little piece of iron, we are having to overcome the big field in which it is at least locally.
"^Actually, of course, this is too much work, and for practical work I will overcome only the solar-system fields. But, even so, that represents a lot of energy. The law of conservation of energy demands that I supply energy equivalent to lifting the degravitized body completely free of the fields by distance, lifting it out to infinity in other words. That's equivalent to the kinetic energy it would have at about sixty miles per second."
Aarn paused. He had his apparatus set up-a strangely shaped series of coils surrounded by a pair of heavy metal plates. A hollow space of about a thousand cubic inches remained in them, and in this space now, Aarn was arranging a lead sphere suspended from one arm of a long-arm balance. It was balanced at the other end by a group of weights totaling five pounds.
From the coils, two heavy copper cables ran, twisted, off to the main power board on the other side of the room.
His apparatus ready, Aarn walked over to the panel and laid his hand on the main power control.
"Ready, I guess. Keep an eye on that lead, Spence, and see if you can keep it balanced!"
Aarn flipped a small switch, a relay thunked over, then rapidly he advanced his controller. For perhaps ten seconds nothing happened.
"Induction-she's building up a magnetic field in there now, and an electric pole, too," Aarn explained.
Then-abruptly, yet leisurely, the weight pan of the longarm balance sank.
"The weight's going!" called Spence excitedly.
"It should!" Aarn grinned. "She's drawing two thousand horse power."
Carlisle watched interestedly as Spencer took weight after weight from the balance pan. Still the scale remained steady. "It's two and a half pounds now-"
"That's about enough," decided Aarn. "I just wanted to show-you."
"Can you make Earth's centrifugal force throw it up?"
"I could-in about four and a half years with this power source. That thing begins building up a back force that makes it hard to pump in juice. That's not the latest design-I've found ways to improve the thing since that was made, which will all be incorporated in the real apparatus. Further, remember, while that's going down fairly fast now, destroying weight is like filling a fuel tank. You can fill a vacuum a lot easier and faster than you can a fuel tank with two tons per square inch in there already. It will begin to show up pretty quickly now. When the weight gets down to about five hundredths of a pound, it will go very slowly." :
Aarn reached over, and made some adjustments on his power board, and all but two meters dropped to zero.
"I'm just holding that now. There's no need to de-weight it, is there? We can't do anything real till we have a big job, and a Sun-tapping beam to run it. It builds up an electric-field back-force of several thousand volts; that's what was stopping that then. With the Sun-beam and a big model I can demonstrate. And-uh-well, I have something else, too. But I'm not ready yet," Aarn hastened to add.
Spencer had started up expectantly when Aarn said he had even more. Now he looked at him disgustedly. "As I told Carlisle, you're as noisy as a clam in hiding when you've got something interesting to puzzle about. Now let me ask a question: How do you know that Sun beam will work? Have you tested it on old Sol?"
Aarn smiled faintly and waved him away. "This isn't my home planet-but even so I like it. I said that got power from the Sun. The ionizing layer, my lad, conducts. Could you imagine what would happen if you short-circuited the Sun? That's why the ship we're going to build as a testing laboratory-we'll need a space laboratory now, and it'll cost you five millions, Spence, my boy-will have a huge bank of these new storage devices.
"You know how much energy accumulators will store. These gravitational coils will store electric power at high voltage and about one thousand times the capacity per pound. We need the storage for the times when you are in an atmosphere, behind a planet, or similarly hindered. Here's a point to remember-you can't have those Sun-beam ships wandering about aimlessly. They'll have to be very strictly limited. One of those fellows could cut a swath through any other ship."
"Whew-what a weapon!" gasped Spencer as he pictured it. "Cut a world in two with that and the Sun's power."
"Uhm-deadly enough if you could get in position, but
that beam is tender in its way. If you just remember these two facts, you'll see why it really isn't much of a weapon, and isn't.to be greatly feared on the score of blowing up a world. That it could be dangerous to a certain extent, is of course true. But remember, that world will have the first chance to put power on the beam. Suppose you are waiting for that beam, and the instant it hits your world you unload a few million volts and a hundred thousand ampere-hours of .accumulators on it as just the frequency it's turned for? Good-by, projector.
"Or suppose you had your beam already developed, reaching from ship to Sun, it would take about a quarter of an hour to develop a beam from the Earth to the Sun because of the finite speed of light-and just wait for the world to move into it. You have to send a signal down the beam which determined to what extent you are going to tap the Sun, naturally, or the Sun would just send a flood that would wipe you out before you could shut it off.
"Then if you signaled for unlimited power, so that you could really damage a world, you'd be wiped out first. And always you have to wait the quarter of an hour or so for the energy to make a round trip-and if it's war, somebody will be out looking for you with something bigger than a mosquito spray."
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