"Williamson, Jack - 01 - The Humanoids 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

"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 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 tranquility 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?"
"Do you know where she went?"
"How could I know?" He had heard enough about the child. "And what does it matter?"
"I imagine it might matter a good deal, sir." The mild voice of Ironsmith sounded more than usually insistent. "Maybe it's none of my business. Maybe your security measures are already adequate. But I really think you ought to find out where she went."
"Where do you think she went?"
"I don't know." Ironsmith ignored his increasing annoyance. "She ran down around a turn of the road out of sight, and when I followed on my cycle she was gone. That's why I thought you'd be interested."
"Really, I don't think you need to worry-" He checked himself, restraining his sarcastic intent. Ironsmith was intelligent, after all; the child's disappearance might turn out to be really important, though he didn't see how. "Thanks for calling," he finished awkwardly. "I'll see about it when I get to the office."



Chapter FOUR

RUTH WAS standing in the hall door when he turned from the telephone. Not yet dressed for the office, she was slim and youthful in a long blue robe he hadn't seen before. Her restless, gaunt face was already made up, her lips invitingly crimson and her dark hair brushed loosely back and shining. She was trying hard, he saw, to look attractive to him.
"Darling, aren't you ever coming to breakfast?" She had studied business diction with her other professional courses, and her throaty voice still had a careful limpid perfection. "I put on your eggs the first time the phone rang, and now they're getting cold."
"I haven't time to eat." He kissed her lifted lips, scarcely interrupting himself. "All I want is a cup of coffee." Seeing the protest on her face, he added defensively, "I'll try to get something later at the cafeteria."
"That's what you always say, but you never do, and I think that's the trouble with your stomach." Urgency began to mar the rich perfection of her voice. "Clay, I want you to stay and eat with me this morning. I want to talk to you."
"There's nothing really wrong with my stomach," he told her, "and the office is already calling. If it's money for anything, you don't have to ask-"
"It isn't money." An impatient firmness thinned her face. "Not even our lost felicity. And the office can wait, this once. Come on and eat your eggs, while we talk."
He followed her slowly to the table in the kitchen, shrinking from any emotional scene. He felt deeply sorry for her, but he had already told her all he could about the project, and he couldn't neglect his imperative duty there.
"Been cleaning?" He looked around at the gleaming white enamel of the kitchen equipment, hoping to divert her. "I still think we ought to hire a maid, if you insist on working."
"I've too much time already." Dismissing that, she sat down across from him, still erect with purpose. "Clay, I want you not to work this morning."
"Why not?"
"I want you to drive in with me to Salt City."
He put down his fork, waiting inquiringly.
"I'm getting so uneasy about you, darling." Trouble was a shadow under her fresh makeup. "I want you to go back to see Dr. Pitcher. I called his office when I found you at home this morning, looking so tired and thin and bad. He can examine you at eleven."
"But I told you the office is calling." He attacked his eggs and toast, as if to prove his health. "I wish you wouldn't worry," he urged her. "Because I already know what Pitcher would say."
"Please, Clay!"
"He'd tell me just what he did last year." Forester tried to appear mildly reasonable. "He'd strip me and thump me and listen to my heart and X-ray my ulcers, and then he'd have to admit that all I need is a holiday."
"He says you must rest." Emotion was shattering the round perfection of her diction. "He wants you to stay at the hospital for at least a week, while he tests you for food allergies and works out a diet for you."
"You know I can't take time for that." He couldn't say why, because everything about the project was still top secret. "I simply can't leave the job-"
"Who'll do it when you're dead?" She half rose, in her agitation, and sat back tautly. "Clay, you're actually killing yourself. Dr. Pitcher says you'll break down unless you stop. Please call the office and tell them we're going."
"I wish we could. To take a long vacation, and finish our honeymoon." He reached to touch her cold hand, quivering on the table, and he saw her sudden tears. "I'm awfully sorry, Ruth," he said softly, "that things turned out this way."
"Then you'll go?" Her pleased voice turned practical. "Let's see, we've about half an hour to pack-"
"No!" He tried to soften his vehemence. "Later, maybe."
"That's what you always say." Her tightening voice lost its round modulation. "Clay, I hate Starmont! Why can't we just forget it, and go away - and not come back?"
"I sometimes wish we could." He caught her hand again. "But it's much too late for that, because I've started something I can't stop-"