"Campbell, John W Jr - Arcot, Wade and Morey 03 - Invaders from the Infinite" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

slant toward some point, but to stand vertical, for, from a distance of
a billion miles, the vision lines were practically parallel. Titanic
shafts of glowing color in the early summer sun appeared; the hot rays
from the sun, now only 82,500,000 miles away, shimmering op the colored
metal walls.

The new Airlines Building, a mile and a half high, supported at various
points by actual space-ship driving units, was a riot of shifting,
rainbow hues. A new trick in construction had been used here, and Evans
smiled at it. Arcot, inventor of the ship that carried him, had
suggested it to Fuller, designer of that ship, and of that building. The
colored beryllium metal of the wall had been ruled with 20,000 lines to
the inch, mere scratches, but nevertheless a diffraction grating. The
result was amazingly beautiful. The sunlight, split up to its rainbow
colors, was reflected in millions of shifting tints.

In the air, supported by tiny packs strapped to their backs, thousands
of people were moving, floating where they wished, in any direction, at
any elevation. There were none of the helicopters of even five years
ago, now. A molecular power suit was far more convenient, cost nothing
to operate, and but $50 to buy. Perfectly safe, requiring no skill,
everyone owned them. To the watcher in space, they were mere moving,
snaky lines of barely distinguishable dots that shivered and seemed to
writhe in the refractions of the air. Passing over them, seeming to pass
almost through them in this strange perspectiveless view, were the
shadowy forms of giant space liners, titanic streamlined hulls. They
were streamlined for no good reason, save that they looked faster and
more graceful than the more efficient spherical freighters, just as
passenger liners of two centuries earlier, with their steam engines, had
carried four funnels and used two. A space liner spent so minute a
portion of its journey in the atmosphere that it was really inefficient
to streamline them.

"Won't be long!" muttered Russ, grinning cheerily at the familiar,
sunlight city. His eyes darted to the chronometer beside him. The view
seemed to be taken from a ship that was suddenly scudding across the
heavens like a frightened thing, as it ran across from Manhattan Island,
followed the Hudson for a short way, then cut across into New Jersey,
swinging over the great woodland area of Kittatiny Park, resting finally
on the New Jersey suburb of New York nestled in the Kittatinies,
Blairtown. Low apartment buildings, ten or twelve stories high, nestled
in the waving green of trees in the old roadways. When ground traffic
ceased, the streets had been torn up, and parkways substituted.

Quickly the view singled out a single apartment, and the great smooth
roof was enlarged on the screen to the absolute maximum clarity, till
further magnification simply resulted in worse stratospheric distortion.
On the broad roof were white strips of some material, making a huge V
followed by two I's. Russ watched, his hand on the control steadying the
view under the Earth's complicated orbital motion, and rotation, further