"Murray Leinster - From Beyond the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

Wardle, "The possible combinations run ten to the ninth."
Professor Wardle nodded.
"Lines per inch, size of screen, images per second, possible colors." He grunted. "Then the scanning
pattern and possible three dimensions and so on. You've got several billion possible variations, all right!"
"Unscramble it, Dad!" said Tommy eagerly. "Please! I want to see what the people look like who're
sending it! Do you think we can lick them if they get tough?"
"I'm telling you," his father explained, "that I can try several billion ways to unscramble this supposed
signal. Even if it can be done, only one of them will be right. It's going to take time."
"But, Dad, please try!"
Tommy was filled with infinite excitement. Which, of course, was not only necessary if the comic
books were to be made to come true, but was wholly normal small boy.
Here was an interstellar signal! He had heard it! Tune the set right and he would see—maybe
something like the giraffe-men who almost killed Captain McGee on the Planet of Sand! Or the frog men
the Star Rover had to fight when a crippled space liner was forced to descend on the watery planet
Alith!
"I've got to figure out a way to unscramble it, Tommy," his father said. "I've got to calculate the
settings that are most likely to show some change on the screen. It's rather like breaking a code. It will
take a couple of weeks to compute a series of settings to try one after the other."
Tommy was unconvinced. He argued. Space Captain McGee's friend Doc Blandy would simply
have whipped out his trusty slide rule and made the computations in seconds. He would push the slide
back and forth, set the television controls according to his computations, and say, "On the beam,
McGee!" And Space Captain McGee would gaze into the television-screen and see the worm monsters
of Blathok about to chloroform Jenny—Captain McGee's girl friend—to transfer the brain of a
worm-monster into her skull. Her body would thereafter house an inveterate enemy to the human race,
with specific plans for annihilating it.
Tommy argued. Impassionedly. In the end his father had to resort to authority to stop his arguing.
And then Tommy was tempted to revert to his former disillusionment about scientists.
But continued belief offered high reward in excitement. So he believed. Still it was a rebellious small
boy who accompanied his father and Professor Wardle home. Even the expected ice-cream cone did not
console him. He consumed it in an avid gloom. His father tried to comfort him.
"After all, we're not sure," he told Tommy. "It might not be a signal at all. Or it might be a signal of a
type that would seem simple enough to the creature who sent it, but hopelessly complicated to us. They
might be so much farther advanced in science. In any case, it's not a thing to be solved off-hand."
"But you're going to try, aren't you, Dad?" asked Tommy desperately. "You said it wouldn't do any
harm! You said we could lick them! They couldn't harm Earth!"
"I'll try," his father assured him. "It's simply useless to go it blind. That's all. I'll have my calculations
done in a couple of weeks, and you can watch while I try the whole business. All right?"
Tommy gulped. He was unable to speak for disappointment. When one is ten years old, odds of
billions to one are negligible, but two weeks of waiting is eternity. It is exactly the same as never. And
this, too, was not only in the necessary pattern of things if the comic books were to come true, but it was
perfectly natural small boy.

THAT night Tommy went rebelliously to bed the third time he was told. He had hung around his
father and Professor Wardle, listening hungrily to every incomprehensible word they said. He was keyed
up to enormous excitement.
He slept only fitfully. The comics had been a make-believe world in which he believed only with a
book in his hand. Now they promised to become real, and he was filled with a monstrous hunger for the
adventure they promised.
He woke at dawn and his lurid, fitful dreams had made him ripe for desperate and daring deeds. He
slipped into his shorts and sandals and went downstairs. He gulped a huge glass of milk and stuffed down