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

thorium oxide in it and it's slightly radioactive. Come here a moment.'
The Mirror man went sceptically forward. He suddenly reached out and passed his hands through the
phantom block.
'It's a phony!' he said firmly. You're trying' to put somethin' over on us!'
'Put on these gloves,' said Jack. 'They've been painted with more of the same radioactive paint.'
The Mirror man incredulously obeyed. He reached again for the phantom block. And he gasped.
Because his hands, encased in these gloves, touched something which was not only solid., but
heavy. He picked it up, held it high; and his face was a study in stupefaction and unwilling
belief. He staggered over to the nearest of his confreres.
'By cripesl' he said dazedly. 'It is real, even if you can't see it! Put y'hands on it!'
The other reporter, who was seated at the table, put his hands right through the object he could
very dimly see. And to the Mirror man the brass block was solid. It was heavy. He gasped again and
his hold relaxed. The phantom slipped from his fingers.
'Look out!'
The man gasped for the third time as the phantom object dropped. And it looked so utterly
unsubstantial that the eye denied its weight. It should have floated down like gossamer, or so it
seemed. But it did fall with the forthrightness of something very heavy indeed.
The man who had just put his hand through it now instinctively held them out to catch it. He
cupped them, in anticipation of something very fragile and light. The phantom struck his hands. It
went through them, and he could not feel it. It reached his knees and penetrated them. It dropped
to the floor and through it, and did not as much as stir the cloth of the seated man's trousers.
'That's gone,' said Jack dryly, 'though I intended to reverse the process and bring it back to
normal. It's felling down toward the centre of the earth,, now, encountering just about as much
resistance from earth and stone as if it were falling through air. I don't think any of us are
likely to see it again.'
Professor Eisenstein beamed. The Mirror man put his head in his hands. The other reporters babbled
together. Gail Kennedy looked, frequently and uneasily at Professor Eisenstein. 'A telephone rang
stridently somewhere. Somebody answered it, out of sight.
'Have I gone nuts ?' the Mirror man exclaimed.
'I don't think so.' Jack assured him. 'If you have, all the rest of us will be nuts, tooa in just
a moment. Because what I've showed you is just a preparation for this.'
He turned and pushed aside a curtain. It took nearly a minute to clear the tiling behind it,
because the curtain hid a space all of forty feet long, and most of that space was filled with an
altogether-extraordinary object.
While Jack thrust at the curtain a distant voice said, evidently into a telephone: 'Professor
Eisenstein's secretary? Yes, the prof-'
Noise cut out the rest of it. Gail Kennedy looked puzzledly at Professor Eisenstein. He was
abruptly alert and feral. He was listening. His eyes, which had been benign, became quite
otherwise. And Gail Kennedy suddenly looked as if she could not believe a thought which had come
to her and which she could not dismiss. She stared at Professor Eisenstein in something
approaching horror.
Jack turned again to his audience. He had cleared the Mole to view. It was a vessel of riveted
steel plates quite ten yards in length and about three yards high. There was a rough approximation
to torpedo shape, but the likeness was not carried far enough to keep it from looking more like a
military tank than anything else.
Yet even that wasn't a fair description. There were neither tractor treads nor wheels. Instead
there was a marine screw propeller in the back and four others mounted vertically where wheels
should have been. They made the Mole into something it was quite impossible to classify.
It was plainly designed for travel, but in what medium was not clear. It did not seem fitted for