"Theodore Sturgeon - Microcosmic God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

no thicker than a lead pencil, that can be coiled on reels like garden hose. Kidder
made cigarette money out of that, too. ‘He went out and bought himself a
cyclotron with part of it.
After that money wasn’t money any more. It was large numbers in little books.
Kidder used little amounts of it to have food and equipment sent out to him, but
after a while that stopped, too. His bank dispatched a messenger by seaplane to
find out if Kidder was still alive. The man returned two days later in a bemused
state, having been amazed something awesome at the things he’d seen out there.
Kidder was alive, all right, and he was turning out a surplus of good food in an
astonishingly simplified syn-thetic form. The bank wrote immediately and wanted
to know if Mr. Kidder, in his own interest, was willing to release the secret of his
dirtless farming. Kidder replied that he would be glad to, and enclosed the
formulas. In a P.S. he said that he hadn’t sent the information ashore because he
hadn’t realized anyone would be interested. That from a man who was responsible
for the greatest sociological change in the second half of the twentieth century-
factory farming. It made him richer; I mean it made his bank richer. He didn’t
give a rap.
Kidder didn’t really get started until about eight months after the messenger’s
visit. For a biochemist who couldn’t even be called ”Doctor” he did pretty well.
Here is a par-tial list of the things that he turned out:
A commercially feasible plan for making an aluminum alloy stronger than the best
steel so that it could be used as a structural metal. . .
An exhibition gadget he called a light pump, which worked on the theory that
light is a form of matter and therefore subject to physical and electromagnetic
laws. Seal a room with a single source, beam a cylindrical vibratory magnetic
field to it from the pump, and the light will be led down it. Now pass the light

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through Kidder’s “lens”-a ring which perpetuates an electric field along the lines
of a high-speed iris-typo camera shutter. Below this is the heart of the light pump-
a ninety-eight-per-cent efficient light absorber, crystalline, which, in a sense, loses
the light in its internal facets. The effect of darkening the room with this apparatus
is slight but measurable. Pardon my layman’s language, but that’s the general idea.
Synthetic chlorophyll-by the barrel.
An airplane propeller efficient at eight times sonic speed.
A cheap goo you brush on over old paint, let harden, and then peel off like strips
of cloth. The old paint comes with it. That one made friends fast.
A self-sustaining atomic disintegration of uranium’s iso-tope 238, which is two
hundred times as plentiful as the old stand-by, U-235.
That will do for the present. If I may repeat myself; for a biochemist who couldn’t
even be called “Doctor,” he did pretty well.
Kidder was apparently unconscious of the fact that he held power enough on his
little island to become master of the world. His mind simply didn’t run to things
like that. As long as he was left alone with his experiments, he was well content to
leave the rest of the world to its own clumsy and primitive devices. He couldn’t be
reached except by a radiophone of his own design, and the only counterpart was
locked in a vault of his Boston bank. Only one man could operate it. The