"Harry Harrison - One Step From Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

The railroads. In a few years everything was different. Raw materials streamed into the factories and
manufactured materials spread out all over the world. Life would never be the same again. Everything
changed. Apparently for the worse, if the slum-living factory workers were any judges. They must have
felt like the Amerinds who saw the white-winged ships sail into the bay. And just about the time the
world was beginning to settle down to the new way of life brought about by the railroads the automobile
was invented.

Not only the buggywhip manufacturers went to the wall when the first cars chugged and backfired down
the dirt roads. Entire cities were to be made unlivable within fifty years. Warm and happy Los Angles
was turned into a poison-gas-filled, deteriorating community completely surrounded by concrete
freeways and hurtling machines. Things were really moving faster by this time, and even while the cars
were pushing out the trains and taking over the world, the airplanes were catching up and passing them
by.New York City is now closer toLondon by plane than the rest ofNew YorkState is by car or train,
closer than the state capital,Albany , is by ship, closer than its city limits are by foot.

That is where we stand now. Every facet of every part of our lives changed by the continuing
transportation revolution of the past century. But what lies ahead? Rockets for one thing, and improved
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means of space travel that might be a little more practical and not quite as expensive. A good bit of
modern science fiction has been involved with an investigation into the effects of space travel; nor is this
well of speculation exhausted yet. Strange devices have been used to postulate space exploration across
the light-year gaps between suns — space warps, subspace drives, and such — and distant, yet
unknown worlds have become story material. Is this all?

Of course not. Time travel is really a form of transportation, and has its own literature. And then there is
the matter transmitter.

This is a good solid theme that has not really received too much attention. And what attention it has
received has been, for the most part, only about how you build the thing and make it work and what
happens when it breaks down. Sort of like early science fiction where the story ended when the rocket
took off. Basically, matter transmitters deal with solid objects in much the same way television deals with
light waves. An image is received by a TV camera where it is broken down into a signal which is then
transmitted to a receiver that converts the signal back into a visible image. MT — derived from matter
transmitter in the same way TV comes from television — has usually been visualized as a breaking up of
the original substance by scanning the molecules and atoms one at a time, then blasting out this scanning
signal to be rebuilt at the receiving end. Sometimes the signal is stored rather than being broadcast which
leads to much fun and games when the same person is rebuilt over and over again from his recordings.

Most MT stories have been of this fun-and-games variety, all involved with building the machine and
seeing what it does to the first victims who are fed therein. All of which can be very interesting, but is by
no means a complete picture of the possibilities of MT. Let us think ahead a bit. If we can imagine an
operating MT we can certainly consider the possibility of the widespread use of MTs. If the machine
works it can be made to work cheaper and better and soon we might be using MTs the same way we
use telephones now. Possible? Of course.