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

But what is the effect on man and his institutions when this happens?

That is the basic question. From it come the secondary questions. Every facet of life poses a new
problem: food and clothes, marriage and business, work and war. Certainly war; the military latches onto
every invention no matter how innocuous and uses it to keep the war machines clanking. Positively
medicine; look how ships have spread disease and how airplanes could do it even better — then
consider the MT plague carriers. Language, social customs, everything will be affected by this new form
of transportation.

In these stories I have attempted to speculate about the answers to some of these questions. I have
started at the beginning, when MT is first used, and have gone on to the end, as I think all good stories
should. I do not pretend that any of the things I predict will happen, though they certainly might if we ever
have operating MT. This is one of the possible histories of the future that could come about under certain
circumstances.

But that is one of the pleasures of science fiction. It gives people a chance to fly in rocket ships before
they are invented, use strange devices still undiscovered, meet fascinating people yet unborn.

A matter transmitter is very easy to use. Just dial your number, there, as simple as a telephone, and wait
until the ready light comes on. Then step forward, you won't feel a thing, just walk through the MT screen
as though it were a door....

HARRY HARRISON
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[ -: CONTENTS :-]


One Step From Earth

THIS LANDSCAPE WAS DEAD. It had never lived. It had been born dead when the planets first
formed, a planetary stillbirth of boulders, coarse sand, jagged rock. The air was thin and so cold that it
was closer to the vacuum of space than to any habitable atmosphere. Though it was nearlynoon and the
pallid, tiny disc of the sun was high overhead, the sky was dark, the wan light shining on the uneven plain
that was unmarked by any footprint. Silent, lonely, empty.

Only the shadows moved. The sun paced its way slowly across the horizon until it set. Night came and
with it an ever greater cold. Silently the dark hours passed, the stars arched by overhead, until on the
opposite horizon the sun appeared once again.

Then something changed. High above there was a tiny flicker of movement as the sun glanced from some
shining surface, a motion where none had existed ever before. It grew to a spot of light that blossomed
suddenly into a long tongue of flame. The flame continued, even brighter as it came close to the surface,
dropped, hovering. Dust billowed out and the rocks melted and then the flame was gone.

The squat cylinder dropped the last few feet and landed on wide-stretched legs. Shock absorbers took
up the impact, giving way, then slowly leveling out the body of the device. It bobbed slightly for a few