"Jack Williamson - The Humanoids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

abided in the rising sun. For an hour he was great. Then Ironsmith came pedaling after him
down a gravel walk, blinking sleepily and lazily chewing gum, to shatter all the splendor of that
vision.
"I found a little error, sir." Grinning with a cheery friendliness, the clerk seemed unaware of
the staggering blow his words inflicted. "Can't you see it, right here? Your symbol rho is
irrelevant. It has no obtainable value, though everything else is correct."
Forester tried not to show how much that hurt him. Thanking the lean youth on the bicycle,
he stumbled dazedly back to his desk and vainly rechecked his work. Ironsmith was right. Rho
really canceled out - the ultimate treasure of the universe, slipping away through his clutching
fingers. The elusive prima materia had evaded him again.
Like the alchemists of the first world, however, whose failures had founded chemistry and
made a basis for the entire science of electromagnetics, he had uncovered new knowledge. For
all the finality of that crushing blunder, he had learned enough to change history and wreck his
stomach and slowly blight his marriage.
He had discovered rhodomagnetics, a vast new field of physical knowledge, lying beside the
old. He had failed, with the loss of that irrelevant symbol, to join it to electromagnetics, but his
corrected equation still described an unsuspected energy-spectrum.
The balanced internal forces of every atom, as he since had proved, included components of
both kinds of energy, even though any statement of their mutual equivalence still eluded him.
And the elements of the second triad of the periodic table proved to be a key to the use of his
new spectrum, a kind of imperfect philosophers' stone, as iron and nickel and cobalt had always
been to the sister energies of the electromagnetic spectrum. With rhodium and ruthenium and
palladium, he unlocked the terrifying wonders of rhodomagnetics.
How had such a basic secret so long evaded all its seekers? That question had struck him
often, since, because the effects of rhodomagnetism seemed obvious to him now, visible
everywhere. But those effects weren't electromagnetic; that, he always decided, must be the
simple answer. The new spectrum obeyed laws of its own, and they must have been its
sufficient cloak against minds trained to think only in terms of the other.
For rhodomagnetic energy was propagated with an infinite velocity, and its effects varied
paradoxically with only the first power and not the square of the distance - stubborn facts which
suggested, as Frank Ironsmith had casually remarked, that the time and space of orthodox
physics, far from being fundamental entities in themselves, were merely incidental aspects of
electromagnetic energy, special limits by which the other energy of the new spectrum was left
unbounded.
Forester had eagerly hoped at first to investigate such philosophic implications of his
discovery, but its ruthless flood had left him no tranquillity for pure research. Sending a few
more problems to Ironsmith, he soon devised the artificial means to duplicate the
rhodomagnetic field he had observed in the heart of that exploding sun. With that dreadful new
device, he could unbalance the rhodomagnetic component essential to the stability of all matter,
and so detonate minor supernovas of his own.
The older science of iron had split the atom, sometimes usefully. Annihilating matter
entirely, his new science of palladium freed a force a thousand times mightier than fission, far
too terrible to be controlled for any creative use. His suitable reward, he thought bleakly now,
had been the project itself.
Forester was still in the bathroom, splashing cold water on his lean-drawn face to arouse
himself from such moody introspections, when the telephone buzzed again behind him.
Shuffling uneasily back to his bedside to answer, he heard the quiet voice of Frank Ironsmith,
less casual than usual.
"Have you heard about Jane Carter - that little girl who came to see you?"
"Yes." He was beginning to want his coffee, and he had no time for trivialities. "So what?"