"Smith, E E Doc - Lensman 4 - Gray Lensman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

His-mind, free at last to make the investigation from which it had been so long and so
sternly barred, flew down into and through the dome, to and into that cryptic globe so
tantalizingly poised in the air of the Center.
The reaction was practically instantaneous; so rapid that any ordinary mind could have
perceived nothing at all; so rapid that even Kinnison's consciousness recorded only a confusedly
blurred impression. But he did see something: in that fleeting millionth of a second he sensed a
powerful, malignant mental force; a force backing multiplex scanners and sub-ethereal stress-
fields interlocked in peculiarly unidentifiable patterns.
For that ball was, as Kinnison had more than suspected, a potent agency indeed. It was,
as he had thought, a communicator; but it was far more than that. Ordinarily harmless enough, it
could be so set as to become an infernal machine at the vibrations of any thought not in a certain
coded sequence; and Helmuth had so set it.
Therefore at the touch of the Patrolman's thoughts it exploded: liberating instantaneously
the unimaginable forces with which it was charged. More, it sent out waves which, attuned to
detonating receivers, touched off strategically-placed stores of duodecaplylatomate. "Duodec",
the concentrated quintessence of atomic violence!
"Hell's . . . Jingling . . . Bells!" Port Admiral Haynes grunted in stunned amazement, then
subsided into silence, eyes riveted upon his plate; for to the human eye dome, fortress, and planet
had disappeared in one cataclysmically incandescent sphere of flame.
But the observers of the Galactic Patrol did not depend upon eyesight alone. Their
scanners had been working at ultra-fast speed; and, as soon as it became clear that none of the
ships of the Fleet had been endangered, Kinnison asked that certain of the spools be run into a
visitank at normal tempo.
There, slowed to a speed at which the eye could clearly discern sequences of events, the
two old Lensmen and the young one studied with care the three-dimensional pictures of what
had happened; pictures taken from points of projection close to and even within the doomed
structure itself.
Deliberately the ball of force opened up, followed an inappreciable instant later by the
secondary centers of detonation; all expanding magically into spherical volumes of blindingly
brilliant annihilation. There were as yet no flying fragments: no inert fragment can fly from
duodec in the first few instants of its detonation. For the detonation of duodec is propagated at
the velocity of light, so that the entire mass disintegrates in a period of time to be measured only
in fractional trillionths of a second. Its detonation pressure and temperature have never been
measured save indirectly, since nothing will hold it except a Q-type helix of pure force. And
even those helices, which must be practically open at both ends, have to be designed and
powered to withstand pressures and temperatures obtaining only in the cores of suns.
Imagine, if you can, what would happen if some fifty thousand metric tons of material
from the innermost core of Sinus B were to be taken to Grand Base, separated into twenty-five
packages, each package placed at a strategic point, and all restraint instantaneously removed.
What would have happened then, was what actually was happening!
As has been said, for moments nothing moved except the ever-expanding spheres of
destruction. Nothing could move— the inertia of matter itself held it in place until it was too
late—everything close to those centers of action simply flared into turgid incandescence and
added its contribution to the already hellish whole.
As the spheres expanded their temperatures and pressures decreased and the action
became somewhat less violent. Matter no longer simply disappeared. Instead, plates and girders,
even gigantic structural members, bent, buckled, and crumbled. Walls blew outward and upward.
Huge chunks of metal and of masonry, many with fused and dripping edges, began to fly in all
directions.
And not only, or principally, upward was directed the force of those inconceivable