"Eric Frank Russel - Mechanistria" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

So did the rest.
Standing at the top of the telescopic metal gangway, I watched the last comers arrive. Jay Score
went down, returned lugging his enormous case. He was allowed more weight in personal luggage
than any three others. No wonder, for only one item among his belongings was a spare atomic
engine, a lovely little piece of engineering coming to eighty pounds. In a way, this was his standby
heart.
Four government experts came aboard in a bunch. I’d no idea of who they were or why they
were going with us, but directed them to their private cabins. The last arrival was young Wilson, a
fair-haired, moody lad of about nineteen. He’d had three boxes delivered in advance and now was
trying to drag three more aboard.
“What’s in those?” I demanded.
“Plates.” He surveyed the ship with unconcealed distaste.
“Repair, dinner or dental?” I inquired.
“Photographic,” he snapped without a glimmer of a smile.
“You the official picture man?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Dump those boxes in mid-hold.”
He scowled. “They are never dumped, dropped, chucked or slung. They are placed,” he said.
“Gently.”
“You heard me!” I liked the kid’s looks but not his surly attitude.
Putting down the boxes at the top of the gangway, and doing it with exaggerated care, he looked
me over very slowly, his gaze travelling from feet to head and all the way down again. His lips
were thin, his knuckles white.
Then he said, “And who might you be when you’re outside your shirt?”
“I’m the sergeant-at-arms,” I informed in I’m-having-no-nonsense-from-you tones. “Now go
dump or place or lower those crates someplace where they’ll be safe, else I’ll toss them a hundred
feet Earthward.”
That got him right in his weak spot. I think that if I’d threatened to throw him for a loop he’d
have had a try at giving me an orbit of my own. But he didn’t intend to let me or anyone else pick
on his precious boxes.
Favouring me with a glance that promised battle, murder and sudden death, he carried the boxes
into mid-hold, taking them one at a time, tenderly, as if they were babies. That was the last I saw
of him for a while. I had been hard on the kid but didn’t realize it at the time.
A couple of the passengers were arguing in their harness just before we threw ourselves away.
Part of my job is to inspect the strappings of novices and they kept at it while I was going over their
belts and buckles.
“Say what you like,” offered one, “but it works, doesn’t it?”
“I know damn well it does,” snorted the other, showing irritation. “That is the hell of it. I’ve
been right through Flettner’s crazy mathematics a thousand times, until my mind’s dizzy with
symbols. The logic is all right. It’s un-assailable. Nevertheless, the premise is completely cockeyed.
“So what? His first two ships reached the Jovian system simply by going zip! and zip! They did
the round trip in less time that any ordinary rocketship takes to make up its mind to boost. Is that
crazy?”
 “It’s blatantly nuts!” swore the objector, his blood pres-sure continuing to rise. “It’s magic and
it’s nuts! Flettner says all astronomical estimates of distances can be scrapped and thrown into the
ash-can because there’s no such thing as speed inside a cosmos which itself-plasma and ether alike-
is in a series of tremendous motions of infinite variability. He says you can’t have speed or
measurable velocity where there’s nothing to which you can relate it except a fixed point which is
purely imaginary and cannot possibly exist. He claims that we’re obsessed by speeds and distances
because our minds are conditioned by established relations inside our own one-cent solar system,