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

cause-and-effect remained the cornerstone of science. Forester shook his head, rising on his
elbow to glare sleepily at the telephone and daring it to ring.
 It didn't. Not in five seconds, or ten. Relaxing to a weary vindication, he looked at his
watch. Nine-twelve. The project seldom let him sleep so late; most nights he couldn't get
home at all. The surprising thing, he told himself, was that Armstrong hadn't already called
about something.
Trying to forget about precognition, he looked across at the other twin bed, to find it empty.
Ruth must be already gone to work at the business office. He sat up heavily, feeling a dull
annoyance at her absence. She certainly didn't need the salary, although he had to admit that
she was an efficient office manager, and it was true the project left him little time for her.
Lifting from the empty bed, his eyes found the huge aluminum observatory dome framed in
the west window. Silvered with the sunlight, it shone with a clean, functional beauty. Once it
had been his life, but the sight of it merely depressed him now. For he had no time for
nonessentials; he didn't even know what work the staff astronomers were doing now with the
big reflector.
Still the telephone hadn't rung. He reached for it impulsively, to call Armstrong, but again
he stopped his hand, reluctant to renew the chains of anxious responsibility which bound him to
the project. In no haste to begin another long day of killing effort and intolerable strain, he sat
back wearily on the side of the bed, looking at that shining dome and thinking moodily of all it
had promised and finally refused him.
He had been just nineteen, still an eager graduate student of astrophysics, the summer he first
saw this naked basalt butte pointing out of the desert like a broad finger at the unsolved riddles
beyond the sky, and knew that here, where the clean dry air made perfect seeing, he must build
his own telescope.
Starmont had cost him many years: all the invincible spirit of his youth spent in begging
grants from wealthy men, rekindling the courage of disheartened associates, conquering all the
difficulties of making and moving and mounting the enormous mirror. He was in his thirties
before it was finally done, hardened and sobered, yet still strong with the drive of science.
The defeats had come later, striking treacherously out of the ultimate unknown he was trying
to explore. He had striven for truth, and it somehow always eluded him. Once the great reflector
had showed him what he thought was the final fact, but the gold had changed as he tried to
grasp it - into confusion and contradiction and the leaden reality of the project itself.
His long quest and his defeat, now that he took this empty moment to look back, reminded
him of the efforts and frustrations of those first scientists of the mother planet, the alchemists.
Ironsmith had lately read him some historical fragment which told how those early searchers
after truth had spent their lives looking for the prima materia and the philosophers' stone - the
single primary material of the universe, according to their naïve theories, and the fabulous
principle that made it appear as common lead or precious gold.
His own disappointed life, it came to him now, had followed an identical pattern, as if the
goal of science had never really changed, in all the ages since. For he had still been searching,
with the aid of more facts and better equipment, for the hidden nature of things. He had found
new knowledge, even as the first alchemists had done, and bitter failure with it.
All the effort of science, he reflected, had been one long pursuit of the elusive prima materia
and the key to all its many manifestations. Other pioneers of thought, in fact, back in the
preatomic age on the mother planet, had even discovered a very useful sort of philosophers'
stone - in common iron.
 Almost magical metal of the first atomic triad, iron had created the mighty science of
electromagnetics. It had worked all the miracles of electronics and nucleonics, and presently
powered ships of space. It even achieved the first object of the old alchemists, as men with
cyclotrons and atomic piles manufactured elements.