"Murray Leinster - The Mole Pirate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

dozen or more of folding chairs in view. On the table before Jack there was a large sheet of white-
painted metal, on which stood a block of brass and a small but intricate contrivance of radio
tubes and the like. Behind him a wide curtain hid the farther wall.
'I'll give you a part of the idea now,' said Jack. 'Professor Eisenstein is late, but I don't want
to start the apparatus until he gets here.'
'What's all this performance about, anyway?' demanded a man from the Mirror. 'Somebody said you
had some kind of gadget that made you able to walk through walls.'
Td hate to tell you what I can do," returned Jack. 'You wouldn't believe me. I'd rather show you.
I've been experimenting on a rather neglected aspect of the atom. You know, of course, that the
atom is regarded today as a sort of miniature solar system, a nucleus like a sun with a greater or
lesser number of electrons revolving around it like planets?'
'Yeah.' The Minor man had appointed himself spokesman. 'We know all that stuff.'
'Good!' said Jack. 'Then we can talk about magnets first. In ordinary iron the molecules have
north and south poles, like all other molecules, but they point in every possible direction,
helter-skelter. They have magnetism in them, but it isn't organized. Pointing haphazard, though
each one is a miniature magnet, in the mass they neutralize each other. It's only when the whole
mass of iron is magnetized that all the poles point in the same direction - or only when they all
point in the same direction that it's magnetized. Is that clear, too?'
'Yeah! I hadda do an interview with Eisenstein once,' said the Mirror man. 'He said I had a brain
for that stuff.'
'Kind of him,' observed Jack. 'Now I've been trying to carry the idea of organization a bit
further. Not only molecules but atoms have poles, and they point helter-skelter in every
direction, too. Suppose I got them all to point in one direction. What would happen then?'
'You could walk through walls?' hazarded the Mirror man.
Jack grinned. 'Not so fast! Let's think it over first. An atom is a miniature solar system. That
means it's practically flat. But with such flatnesses pointing in every direction - well, an
enlarged picture of any sort of matter would be just about like a dozen packs of cards being
poured from one basket to another and back again. They'd be fluttering every which way. You
couldn't swing a stick through those falling cards without hitting a lot of them.'
'Not unless you were pretty good,' conceded the Mirror man.


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'But if you had the same number of cards falling, only in a neat and orderly fashion, every one
parallel, so they'd stack up all face down in the bottom basket. It's a standard card trick to
spring a pack of cards from one hand to the other like that. You could swing a stick through that
bunch.'
'You might knock one of 'em away,' said the Mirror man cautiously, 'but you wouldn't mess up the
whole works. They wouldn't block up the whole distance between the baskets.'
'Just so!' said Jack approvingly. 'Professor Eisenstein was right. You do have a head for this
stuff. Now the object of my experiments has been to arrange the atoms in a solid object like the
second bunch of cards. They're flat. And it turns out that when they're arranged that way, all
parallel, they block so small a proportion of the space they ordinarily close up, that they will
pass right through ordinary matter with only the slightest of resistance. And that resistance
comes from just such accidental collisions as you suggested.'
There was a stirring at the door. The snow-white hair and bushy, sandy whiskers of Professor
Eisenstein came into the room. He beamed at Jack and the reporters. He spoke separately to Gail
Kennedy, bending over her hand. The girl looked at him queerly. She was here because she intended