"Jack Williamson - The Humanoids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)
The red glow of their dying fire touched warm glints in Ruth's hair, but the thin light of the
star was cold on her hurt white face, and it made hard blue diamonds of her tears.
"Please, darling!" He gestured eagerly at that stabbing violet point, and saw the sharp black
shadow of his arm across her face. Its stellar magnitude, he thought, must be still increasing. "I
knew that star was ripe for this," he told her breathlessly. "From its spectrum. I've been hoping
this would happen in my lifetime. The computing section has finished the preliminary work,
and I've special equipment ready to study it. It may tell us - everything! Please, darling-"
She yielded then, as gracefully as she could, to his more urgent passion. They left their
basket and blanket forgotten on the beach, and drove hard to reach Starmont before the star had
set. She went with him into the whispering gloom under the high dome, watching with an
injured wonder as he toiled so frantically to set up his special spectrographs and expose his
special plates while the seeing lasted.
Forester's flash of intuition, when presently it came, was as dazzling to him as the
supernova's light. It illuminated the cause of that stellar engine's wreck, and revealed a new
geometry of the universe, and showed him a deeper meaning even in the familiar pattern of the
periodic table of the elements.
In his first hot fever of perception, he thought he had seen even more. He thought he had
found his own prima materia - the ultimate understanding of the fundamental stuff of nature
that science had sought since science was born. All the laws of the universe, he believed at
first, could be derived from his basic equation linking the rhodomagnetic and electromagnetic
fields.
Trembling with a breathless weakness, he dropped and smashed the best set of plates, the
ones which most unmistakably showed the spectral displacements due to the altered
rhodomagnetic field which had destroyed the internal balance of the star. He broke his pen,
in his cooling crucibles, had ever been more elated.
Wistfully, now, he recalled the trembling emotion which had swept him out of the
observatory, coatless and hatless in the blue chill of a windy winter dawn, to hammer and shout
outside the two rooms where Ironsmith lived at the computing section - the vacated offices of
the discharged staff members. That sleepy youth appeared at last, and Forester thrust the hasty
calculations at him.
Drunk with his imagined triumph, Forester thought the expansions and transformations of
that equation would answer every question men could ask, about the beginning and the nature
and the fate of all things, about the limits of space and the mechanics of time and the meaning
of life. He thought he had found the long-hidden cornerstone of all the universe.
"A rush job," he barked impatiently. "I want you to check all this work, right away -
particularly this derivation for rho." Then Ironsmith's yawning astonishment made him aware
of the time, and he muttered apologetically, "Sorry to wake you."
"Never mind that," the young man told him cheerfully. "I was running the machines until an
hour ago, anyhow, playing around with a new tensor of my own. Things like this aren't really
work to me, sir."
Burning with impatience, Forester watched him glance indolently through the pages of
hurried symbols. Ironsmith's pink face frowned suddenly. Clucking with his tongue, he shook
his sandy head. Still saying nothing, he turned with an infuriating deliberation to his keyboards
and began deftly punching out paper tapes, setting up the problems in patterns of perforations
the machines could read.
Too restless to wait on the murmuring, unconcerned machines, Forester went outside again,
to stalk the windy lawns of Starmont like a planet-bound god. Watching the dawn turn golden
on the desert, he convinced himself that his groping mind had grasped a mightier power than
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