"Blish, James - Beep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

wholly owned by a J. Shelby Stevens, in Rico City. It was
first registered this year."
"Arrest him, on suspicion of espionage."
The door swung open and Dr. Wald came in, all six and
a half feet of him. He was extremely blond, and looked
awkward, gentle, and not very intelligent.
"Thor, this young lady is our press nemesis, Dana Lje.
Dana, Dr. Wald is the inventor of the Dirac communicator,
about which you have so damnably much information."
"It's out already?" Dr. Wald said, scanning the girl with
grave deliberation.
"It is, and lots morelots more. Dana, you're a good girl
at heart, and for some reason I trust you, stupid though it
is to trust anybody in this job. I should detain you until Year
Day, videocasts or no videocasts. Instead, I'm just going to ask
you to sit on what you've got, and I'm going to explain why."
"Shoot."
"I've already mentioned how slow communication is be-
tween star and star. We have to carry all our letters on
ships, just as we did locally before the invention of the
telegraph. The overdrive lets us beat the speed of light, but
not by much of a margin over really long distances. Do you
understand that?"
"Certainly," Dana said. She appeared a bit nettled, and
Weinbaum decided to give her the full dose at a more rapid
pace. After all, she could be assumed to be better informed
than the average layman.
"What we've needed for a long time, then," he said, "is
some virtually instantaneous method of getting a message
from somewhere to anywhere. Any time lag, no matter how
small it seems at first, has a way of becoming major as longer
and longer distances are involved. Sooner or later we must
have this instantaneous method, or we won't be able to get
messages from one system to another fast enough to hold
our jurisdiction over outlying regions of space."
"Wait a minute," Dana said. "I'd always understood that
ultrawave is faster than light."
"Effectively it is; physically it isn't. You don't understand
that?"
She shook her dark head.
"In a nutshell," Weinbaum said, "ultrawave is radiation,
and all radiation in free space is limited to the speed of light.
The way we hype up ultrawave is to use an old application
of wave-guide theory, whereby the real transmission of
energy is at light speed, but an imaginary thing called "phase
velocity" is going faster. But the gain in speed of transmis-
sion isn't largeby ultrawave, for instance, we get a message
to Alpha Centauri in one year instead of nearly four. Over
long distances, that's not nearly enough extra speed."
"Can't it be speeded further?" she said, frowning.