"Robert Heinlein - The Man Who Sold the Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

“Eh? Oh, I get you. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t ever waste time being sorry. We’ll go ahead as originally planned. We’ll get there!”
“Sure we will.”



CHAPTER SEVEN


FROM THE JUNE ISSUE of Popular Technics magazine: “URANIUM PROSPECTING ON THE MOON—A Fact Article about a soon-to-come Major Industry.”

From HOLIDAY: “Honeymoon on the Moon—A Discussion of the Miracle Resort that your children will enjoy, as told to our travel editor.”

From the American Sunday Magazine: “DIAMONDS ON THE MOON?—A World Famous Scientist Shows Why Diamonds Must Be Common As Pebbles in the Lunar Craters.”
“Of course, Clem, I don’t know anything about electronics, but here is the way it was explained to me. You can hold the beam of a television broadcast down to a degree or so these days, can’t you?”
“Yes—if you use a big enough reflector.”
“You’ll have plenty of elbow room. Now Earth covers a space two degrees wide, as seen from the Moon. Sure, it’s quite a distance away, but you’d have no power losses and absolutely perfect and unchanging conditions for transmission. Once you made your set-up, it wouldn’t be any more expensive than broadcasting from the top of a mountain here, and a derned sight less expensive than keeping copters in the air from coast to coast, the way you’re having to do now.”
“It’s a fantastic scheme, Delos.”
“What’s fantastic about it? Getting to the Moon is my worry, not yours. Once we are there, there’s going to be television back to Earth, you can bet your shirt on that. It’s a natural set-up for line-of-sight transmission. If you aren’t interested, I’ll have to find someone who is.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t interested.”
“Well, make up your mind. Here’s another thing, Clem—I don’t want to go sticking my nose into your business, but haven’t you had a certain amount of trouble since you lost the use of the power satellite as a relay station?”
“You know the answer; don’t needle me. Expenses have gone out of sight without any improvement in revenue.”
“That wasn’t quite what I meant. How about censorship?”
The television executive threw up his hands. “Don’t say that word! How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over wLhat we can say and can’t say and what we can show and what we can’t show—it’s enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak. If I were able to lay my hands on those confounded, prurient-minded, slimy—”
“Easy! Easy!” Harriman interrupted. “Did it ever occur to you that there is absolutely no way to interfere with a telecast from the Moon—and that boards of censorship on Earth won’t have jurisdiction in any case?”
“What? Say that again.”

“LIFE goes to the Moon.’ LIFE-TIME Inc. is proud to announce that arrangements have been completed to bring LIFE’S readers a personally conducted tour of the first trip to our satellite. In place of the usual weekly feature ‘LIFE Goes to a Party’ there will commence, immediately after the return of the first successful—”

“ASSURANCE FOR THE NEW AGE”
(An excerpt from an advertisement of the North Atlantic Mutual Insurance and Liability Company)
“—the same looking-to-the-future that protected our policy-holders after the Chicago Fire, after the San Francisco Fire, after every disaster since the War of 1812, now reaches out to insure you from unexpected loss even on the Moon—”

“THE UNBOUNDED FRONTIERS OF TECHNOLOGY”
“When the Moon ship Pioneer climbs skyward on a ladder of flame, twenty-seven essential devices in her ‘innards’ will be powered by especiallyengineered DELTA batteries—”

“Mr. Harriman, could you come out to the field?”
“What’s up, Bob?”
“Trouble,” Coster answered briefly.
“What sort of trouble?”
Coster hesitated. “I’d rather not talk about it by screen. If you can’t come, maybe Les and I had better come there.”
“I’ll be there this evening.”
When Harriman got there he saw that LлCroix’s impassive face concealed bitterness, Coster looked stubborn and defensive. He waited until the three were alone in Coster’s workroom before he spoke. “Let’s have it, boys.”
LeCroix looked at Coster. The engineer chewed his lip and said, “Mr. Harriman, you know the stages this design has been through.”
“More or less.”
“We had to give up the catapult idea. Then we had this—” Coster rummaged on his desk, pulled out a perspective treatment of a four-step rocket, large but rather graceful.“Theoretically it was a possibility; practically it cut things too fine. By the time the stress group boys and the auxiliary group and the control group got through adding things we were forced to come to this—” He hauled out another sketch; it was basically like the first, but squattier, almost pyramidal. “We added a fifth stage as a ring around the fourth stage. We even managed to save some weight by using most of the auxiliary and control equipment for the fourth stage to control the fifth stage. And it still had enough sectional density to punch through the atmosphere with no important drag, even if it was clumsy.”
Harriman nodded. “You know, Bob, we’re going to have to get away from the step rocket idea before we set up a schedule run to the Moon.”
“I don’t see how you can avoid it with chem-powered rockets.”
“If you had a decent catapult you could put a single-stage chem-powered rocket into an orbit around the Earth, couldn’t you?”
“Sure.”