"Murray Leinster - The Boomerang Circuit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

be better? When slaves on Utbeg began to tell each other in murmurs that there was a place where
people weren't slaves? Don't you see that such things would alarm the rulers of such Planets? How can
people be held as slaves unless you keep them in despair?"
The Colony Organizer corrected his course a trifle. Far away the walls of the capital city of
Terranova glinted in the sunlight
"And there are the twenty-one planets which fell into our laps when we had to smash Sinab," said
Kim. "Ades became the subject of dreams. Peasants and commoners think of it yearningly, as a sort of
paradise. But kings and tyrants dream of it either as a nightmare which threatens the tranquility of their
realms, or else as a very pretty bit of loot to be seized if possible. There are probably ten thousand royal
courts where ambitious men rack their brains for some plausible way to wipe out Ades as a menace and
take over our twenty-one planets for loot. Ades is already full of spies, sent there in the guise of exiles.
There've been men found murdered after torture,—seized and tortured by spies hoping to find out the
secrets by which we whipped Sinab. There's one bomb-crater on Ades already, where a bomb
smuggled through the transmitter was set off in an effort to wipe out all the brains on the planet. It didn't,
but it was bad."

CHAPTER II
Enemy Sabotage

SKILFULLY the Colony Organizer sent the flier into the long shallow glide that would land it in the
planet capital city. There were only twenty thousand people in that city. It would rate as a village
anywhere except on Ades, but it was the largest settlement on Terranova.
"Then you think," said the harassed Organizer, "that some outrage has been committed and the
transmitter on Ades damaged —perhaps by another bomb?"
"I hope it's no worse than that," said Kim. "I don't know what I fear, but there are still sixteen million
people on Ades, and some of them are very decent folk. In a little while I'll know if it's nothing important,
or if it's bad. I could have found out back at home, but I wanted to hold on to hope."
His lips were tightly compressed. The flier landed. The two men got out and went along a yielding
walk to the central square of the city.
Many persons had collected in the square, more people in that one spot than Kim had seen together
for many years. Now at least a thousand men and women and children had gathered, and were standing
motionless, looking at the tall arch of the transmitter.
There would have been nothing extraordinary about the appearance of the arch to a man from past
ages. It would have seemed to be quite commonplace—gracefully designed, to be sure, and with a
smooth purity of line which the ancient artists only aspired to, but still not at all a remarkable object. But
the throng of onlookers who stared at it, did so because they could look through it. That had never
before been possible. It had been a matter-transmitter. Now it was only an arch. The people stared.
Kim went in the technician's door at the base of the arch. The local matter-technician greeted him
with relief.
"I'm glad you have come, Kim Rendell," he said uneasily. "I can find nothing wrong. Every circuit is
correct. Every contact is found. But it simply does not work!"
"I'll see," said Kim. "I'm sure you are right; but I’ll verify it. Yet I'm afraid I'm only postponing a test I
should have made before."
He went over the test-panel, trying the various circuits. All checked up satisfactorily. He went behind
the test-panel and attached a number of leads. He returned to the front and worked the panel again. The
results were wildly at variance with the original readings, but Kim regarded them with an angry
acceptance.
"I reversed some leads, just in case a checking instrument was out by the same amount as a circuit,"
he told the technician. "To be frank about it, I made sure you hadn't knocked out the transmitter on
purpose. Such things have been done." Then he said grimly. "This one is all right. The transmitter on Ades