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

anyhow, before the occurrence or after.
He could still hear Ruth doing something in the kitchen. Baking a cake, perhaps, for she still
had periodic fits of domesticity when she stayed away from the office to clean house or cook.
He glanced again at the demure vivacity of her face in that old photograph, feeling a bleak
regret for the emptiness of their marriage.
Nobody was to blame. Ruth had tried desperately, and he thought he had done his best. All
the trouble came from that remote star in the Crater, which had already exploded, actually, long
before either one of them was born. If the speed of light had been a trifle slower, it occurred to
him, he might have been a doting father by now, and Ruth a contented wife and mother.
Nursing that wistful reflection, he reached absently for his slippers where Ruth had set them
for him under the edge of the bed, and shuffled into the bathroom. He paused a moment before
the mirror there, trying to recover some impression of himself on their wedding day. He
couldn't have been quite so skinny then, or so bald, not quite such a frowning, anxious little
brown-eyed gnome. Surely he had looked happier and healthier and more human then, or Ruth
would have chosen Ironsmith.
That lost self of his had been a different man, he knew, still eagerly absorbed in the quest for
final truth, still confident that it existed. His place was already secure in the comfortable
aristocracy of science, and the ascending path of his career looked smooth ahead. He had
meant to share his life fairly with Ruth, until the project claimed him.
The first cold rays of the new star, arriving two centuries old, cut short their honeymoon and
changed everything. Very young and completely serious about the rites of life, for all her brisk
skill with electronic calculators, Ruth had planned the trip. They were staying at the small West
Coast town where she was born, and that evening they had driven out to an abandoned
lighthouse and carried their picnic basket down the cliffs to a narrow scrap of beach beneath.
"That's the old Dragonrock Light." They were sprawled on their blanket in the dusk, her
dark head pillowed on his shoulder, and she was happily introducing him to her fondest
childhood recollections. "Grandfather used to keep it, and sometimes came down to visit-"
He saw a faint cold light on the cliffs, and turned his head and found the star. The hard
violet splendor of it took his breath and brought him upright. His memory of that moment was
always poignant with the cold sting and the salt taste of spray from the breakers, and the sharp
smoke of damp driftwood smoldering, and Ruth's perfume - a heavy scent called Sweet
Delirium. He could still see the hard blue glitter of the star's thin light, in her first tears.
 Because she cried. She was no astronomer. She knew how to set up and operate an
electronic integrator, but the Crater Supernova was just a point of light to her. She wanted to
show Forester these places hallowed in her memories of childhood, and it hurt her that some
silly star should interest him more than the depth of her young love.
"But look, darling!" Checking its position with a little pocket glass, he tried to tell her what a
supernova meant. "I know that star from its position. Normally it's of the eleventh magnitude -
too faint to see without a powerful telescope. Now it must be about minus nine. Twenty
magnitudes of change! Which means it's a hundred million times brighter than it was a few
days ago. That's a supernova - right here in our home galaxy, just two hundred light-years
away! A chance like this won't come again, not in a thousand years!"
Wounded and silent, she was watching him and not the star.
"Any star, our own sun, is a great atomic engine." He tried hard to make her see. "For
millions and billions of years it runs normally, changing its mass into measured energy.
Sometimes, adjusting its equilibrium, one flares up with heat enough to melt its planets, and
then you have an ordinary nova. But a few stars go somehow - wrong. Stability fails
altogether. The star explodes into perhaps a billion times its normal brightness, releases a flood
of neutrinos, and completely changes its state, shrinking to become a white dwarf. The thing is
an unsolved mystery - as fundamental as the sudden failure of the binding force that lets an