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

The philosophers of that restless age had tried the new wonder-stuff on the common facts of
the universe, and Forester could sense the brief triumph they must have felt when most of their
riddles seemed to vanish. The electromagnetic spectrum ran from radio waves to cosmic rays,
and the mathematicians of a new physics had dreamed for a time of their own special prima
materia, a unified field equation.
Forester could share the bewildered frustration of those hopeful scientists, in their inevitable
defeat before a few stubborn facts which would not yield to iron. A few phenomena, as various
as the binding force which contains the disruptive energy of atoms and the repulsion which
thrusts galaxies apart, perversely refused to be joined in the electromagnetic system. Iron alone
was not enough.
In his own quest, he had tried another key.
The prima materia he had sought was nothing material, but only understanding. His lofty
goal had been just one equation, which would be the basic statements of all reality, the final
precise expression of the whole nature and relation of matter and energy, space and time,
creation and decay. Knowledge, he knew, was often power, but the difficulties of his pursuit
had left him little time to think of what other men might do with the potent truth he hoped to
find.
Iron had failed. He tried palladium. All Starmont was merely the tool he had shaped for that
vast effort. The cost had been half a lifetime spent, a fortune squandered, the wasted labor and
the broken hopes of many men. The final outcome was titanic disaster, as inexplicable as any
failure of those first alchemists, when their crucibles of molten lead and sulphur tantalizingly
didn't turn to gold. The defeat had all but shattered him, despite the incidental knowledge he
had found, and even now he couldn't understand it.
A faint clatter from the kitchen told him now that Ruth was still at home. Glad she hadn't
gone to work, he looked at her dark-haired head smiling sedately from the photograph standing
on his chest of drawers, the one she had given him not long before their marriage - five years
ago, that must be, or nearly six.
Starmont had been new then, and his tremendous vision still unshattered. It was trouble in
the computing section that first brought Ruth Cleveland to the observatory. He had secured a
grant of military funds to pay for, the battery of electronic calculators and hire a staff to run
them. The section was planned to do all the routine math for the research staff as well as for the
military projects to be set up later, but it began with a persistent series of expensive errors.
Ruth had been the remarkably enchanting expert sent by the instrument firm to repair the
machines. Briskly efficient, she tested the equipment and interviewed the staff - the chief
computer and his four assistants and the graduate astronomer in charge. She even talked with
Frank Ironsmith, who was not quite twenty then, only the office boy and janitor.
"The machines are perfect," she reported to Forester. "Your whole trouble has evidently
been in the human equation. What you need is a mathematician. My recommendation is to
transfer the rest of your staff, and put Mr. Ironsmith in charge."
 "Ironsmith?" Forester remembered staring at her, his incredulous protest slowly melting into
a shy approval of the fine, straight line of her nose and the clear intelligence behind her dark
eyes. "That fresh kid?" he muttered weakly. "He hasn't a single degree."
"I know. He's a prospector's son, and he didn't have much schooling. But he reads, and he
has a mind for math." A persuasive smile warmed her lean loveliness. "Even Einstein, the
mathematician back on the mother planet who first discovered atomic energy, was once just a
patent office clerk. Frank told me so today."
Forester had never suspected any unusual ability behind Ironsmith's cheerful indolence, but
the unsolved problems were piling up. The math section was as essential to his purpose as the
telescope itself. Reluctantly, because Ruth would admit no choice, he agreed to try Ironsmith.
And the errors somehow ceased. As casually unhurried as when his chief tool had been a