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

"I shouldn't have cared to develop it if it had been as dangerous as it might have been," Spencer said quietly. "But then, why did you say you couldn't use it in an atmosphere?"
"Short-circuiting the beam is the signal for unlimited power. Hold it on long enough, and you'd get the power."
"Right enough, and tell me why I have to build that five-million-credit flying laboratory," demanded Spencer.
"So I can test out a few things. And-uh-don't put any rockets in it. Get out of the lab here and let me work."
Wherewith Aam reached out two great arms like tree trunks, and lifted Spencer in one hand and Carlisle in the other, deposited them outside his door, and locked it.
Carlisle looked at the door sourly and brushed himself. "He didn't have to do that to me. I wasn't so damn interested I had to be thrown out."
"Oh," said Spencer hopelessly, "that guy's got my psychology down to a hair line. He knows I won't be. happy till I know why we won't need rockets. How in the name of the Nine Wandering Worlds is he going to drive a ship in space without rockets? I can accept his antigravity, because we've known that was coming for a century.
"His Sun beam as he calls it-that's as breath-taking, as utterly original and brilliant as, anything man ever did. The colossal, unmitigated gall of a man that will light his cigarette from the fires of the Sun! It would take a man* without nerves, without fear, to think of anything as utterly outrageously and gloriously bold as to tap the mightiest machine, as he well called it, for power.
"But now that he's done it, anyone can see that that's the obvious-source of power.
"But what's the next stunt?" He, too, looked at the door with anguish.
The door opened abruptly, and Aarn's head appeared. "And, Carlisle, I'll further demonstrate that physics' theories of the atom have their uses."
The head disappeared.
A slow smile spread over Carlisle's face as he looked at Russ Spencer. "I'll bet that information was just enough to give you a complete headache," he said gravely.
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"CAB," SAID Spencer with bitterness, "it's a pleasure to call you in here. It's a great soothing agent to have someone pay some attention to you when you ask him to come. For the past week I've been asking Aarn to take an hour off and come have a conference on the ship. The framework plans he sent have been converted into steel and aluberyl. The plates have been welded on. The thing is now a completed hull. But Aarn won't come."
"Has a name been picked for it?" asked Carlisle unsym-pathetically. "If not, may I suggest Little Sunbeam?"
Spencer looked even more aggrieved. "Little credit-eater would be more appropriate. It has cost me two and a half million so far."
"What? Two and a half million? How come, if it's just
ahull?"
"Oh, he had a lot"of machinery made for it-lot of stuff all ready to install, but he hasn't had time to get around to-"
"Great spaces and little meteors! What was that?" The entire office building was still trembling and shaking to the sudden strain. It had been a violent howl of terrible wind, an abrupt clutch as of starting space ship's acceleration, a wrench and quiver that shook the very ground and rock beneath them. In the instant that straining yank endured, the wind became a live, shuddering, whining thing that whimpered in terror and rushed into some unknown thing.
The telephonescope clucked and buzzed suddenly. Spencer reached over and flipped his end on, and instantly Aarn's face appeared.
Russ beat him to the draw: "What," he demanded, "in the name of the Nine Wandering Worlds did you do that time?"
Aarn smiled slowly and answered: "Miscalculated. The range wasn't controlled right. It is now. Want another one?" He disappeared for an instant, and during that instant the yank and strain and howling wind reappeared. "I have," announced Aarn slowly, "proved a further use of physical atomic theory. And I will come over. How far is it from where I am to your office?"
"Seven and a half miles," answered Spencer blankly.
Aarn disappeared from view; the telephonescope went blank. For some seconds Spence continued looking on the screen.
"But why do you want to know that, you knew it already?" he asked inanely of the blank screen.
"Open the window for him, will you, Spence. I'm lazy."
Carlisle waved a negligent hand toward the office window, a wide sheet of crystal-clear glass that opened on a pleasant rolling mountainside, for Spencer's office was in one of his own buildings. Just now the view was obscured by Aarn's ponderous figure. He was apparently lying on a metal beam about an eighth of an inch thick, and six feet long by ten inches wide, floating in the air. At the forward end of it was mounted a torpedo-head shaped object which evidently acted as combined air break, engine room, and control panel.
For at least forty-five long seconds Spencer stared blankly at the figure calmly lying there. Then Aarn's annoyed voice came through the window: "The walrus is getting a bit
tired of being stared at. Open the window and let me in."
Spencer opened the window with a jump and dodged out of the way as Aarn's strange device suddenly spun on an axis about the engine head, and darted, straight through the window at a speed of fully seventy miles an hour, and instantly stopped dead in the center of the room.
"This," said Aarn calmly, settling himself as though on a couch in the middle of the room and resting on air, "represents a model of our ship laboratory. You noticed the speed I made coming over. It is seven and a half miles. I came at a speed of nearly one thousand miles an hour, because this device can accelerate and decelerate rather rapidly. I would have been able to get here sooner, you see, if I had had better control. But I have had this thing in Working order only about six hours."
"But what is it, you asteroid? What is it?" demanded Spencer, trying to get near it, but it moved away with delicate precision each time he approached.
"A model of our ship lab. It has antigravity, of course. Improved, I may say. I can't dismount here, and every time you try to enter my de-gravitational field the thing shys away, because you have weight.
"That is not new.. But the little device I use in driving it is new. Now look here."
Aarn raised the metal hood of the torpedo-shaped head, and displayed the several pieces of apparatus contained therein.
"That is the antigravity device. It is charged with nearly fifteen thousand credits' worth of your power. This is the storage apparatus. It stores up the power I need for running the thing in a type of gravity field. Remember that a gravity field represents an energy storage also, but more intense storage is possible than in magnetic or electric. In
this little thing is about three thousand credits' worth of power.
"The third and fourth devices-here and here-are really interconnected and balanced to work as one piece. They are the momentum and kinetic energy devices. Both momentum and kinetic energy involve time, remember.
"But the important thing comes from the wave-mechanics consideration of matter and energy. Remember that an electron is like a photon-it behaves both as corpuscle and as wave in various conditions. Wave mechanics explain that something like this: the electron is always a wave, but can behave like a corpuscle because the waves which make up the true electron and extend through all space-to infinity and back-interact and pile up in one place to make a noticeable knot of energy we call an electron. In only that one limited place do the waves pile up and add to each other. Everywhere else in all infinity the waves are so arranged as to cancel out, but fliey are there just the same.
"That is one phase of the wave-mechanics atom. And it is the phase that so annoys Carlisle here. He can't make his waves react and produce sulphuric acid.
"Seriously, I agree that is an objection. But, you see, one of the things a consideration of wave mechanics produces is very interesting. It is really two things-two formulas. One shows that momentum is something of the nature of a wave formation. The other shows that velocity also is a wave formula.
"In other words, if we produce the right waves, we would have momentum synthetically produced, and the same fqr velocity. That means momentum and velocity can be 'tuned in,' and we have that long-sought thing-a driving device that reacts on space itself. Not the empty space you see outside the portholes of a rocket. The physical space of gravitational fields and dynamic > strains, of tremendous moving
fields of force that tug and weave and pull. Space isn't empty. It's alive with a billion billion strains and stresses. They are physical and real and solid.
"And there are the infinitely extending canceled waves of every electron and every proton in space. That space is solid, firm, something whose fabric is tougher than any metal ever could be. That's the space this device works on.
"It's an oscillator that sets up an oscillating field of force about itself that extends for some ten feet in all directions at full power, lesser distance at lower power, and somewhat modified by the presence of matter within it. It is an oscillation between magnetic, electric, and gravitational fields of force, a circular motion through those three of perfectly inconceivable frequency. I don't quite get it myself.
"Only I can control it. Doesn't take the amount of energy you'd expect because, remember, it isn't like the blessed rocket which has no relativity. This has. It takes about ten times the energy you'd expect for high speeds, and actually produces energy at lower speeds. I can measure an 'absolute' speed with this. I can determine the velocity of the universe-or this part of it, at least-relative to Earth.
"This catches its fingers in the web of space, and I can either drag on it, or push on it, but it does have that relative base, whereas the rocket, with no relative base to work against, of course, apparently violates all laws of physics-at least two of them."
"But how about the velocities we use in interplanetary work?" demanded Spencer.