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

"No. Think of the ultrawave beam between here and
Centaurus III as a caterpillar. The caterpillar himself is
moving quite slowly, just at the speed of light. But the pulses
which pass along his body are going forward faster than he
isand if you've ever watched a caterpillar, you'll know that
that's true. But there's a physical limit to the number of
pulses you can travel along that caterpillar, and we've already
reached that limit. We've taken phase velocity as far as it
will go.
"That's why we need something faster. For a long time
our relativity theories discouraged hope of anything faster
even the high-phase velocity of a guided wave didn't con-
tradict those theories; it just found a limited, mathematically
imaginary loophole in them. But when Thor here began
looking into the question of the velocity of propagation of
a Dirac pulse, he found the answer. The communicator he
developed does seem to act over long distances, any distance,
instantaneouslyand it may wind up knocking relativity into
a cocked hat."
The girl's face was a study in stunned realization. "I'm
not sure I've taken in all the technical angles," she said.
"But if I'd had any notion of the political dynamite in this
thing"
"you'd have kept out of my office," Weinbaum said
grimly. "A good thing you didn't. The Brindisi is carrying
a model of the Dirac communicator out to the periphery
for a final test; the ship is supposed to get in touch with
me from out there at a given Earth time, which we've
calculated very elaborately to account for the residual
Lorentz and Milne transformations involved in overdrive
flight, and for a lot of other time phenomena that wouldn't
mean anything at all to you.
"If that signal arrives here at the given Earth time, then
aside from the havoc it will create among the theoretical
physicists whom we decide to let in on itwe will really
have our instant communicator, and can include all of oc-
cupied space in the same time zone. And we'll have a terrific
advantage over any lawbreaker who has to resort to ultra-
wave locally and to letters carried by ships over the long
haul."
"Not," Dr. Wald said sourly, "if it's already leaked out."
"It remains to be seen how much of it has leaked,"
Weinbaum said. "The principle is rather esoteric, Thor, and
the name of the thing alone wouldn't mean much even to
a trained scientist. I gather that Dana's mysterious informant
didn't go into technical details . . . or did he?"
"No," Dana said.
'Tell the truth, Dana. I know that you're suppressing
some of that letter."
The girl started slightly. "All rightyes, I am. But nothing