"Campbell, John W Jr - Atomic Power UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

The officers would not sail. They might have sailed for the moment to end the deaths at the wharf, but they could not, for the ship, already filled to capacity, was overloaded. Further, she swayed slowly to the struggles of her passengers.
Then a hold, hitherto undiscovered, was broken open. Instantly a torrent of people poured in, and another five thousand came aboard the ship. A slow, grinding pressure began, and those who, finding themselves in the heated hallways, had
stopped, satisfied, and blocked the entrance of more thereby, were gradually driven farther.
The captain ordered the ship to sail. The lines were cast off again, and the ship's great screws turned slowly. No human strength could hold her in now, and she broke free of the crowd at the wharf. But in the harbor, free of the crowd, she stopped again at once. The captain ordered that the crowd be forced off onto the ice shelf that they might walk home. Armed men descended toward them from the bridge.
Half a hundred shots rang out from the crowd. Three guns burst, but the captain and his officers died. The engineer died soon, and his staff was forced to obey the orders from the amateur pilot above.
The Atlantic weighed eighty-five thousand tons normally. Her mass remained, and she had more than her normal load aboard her now. The channels had been broken by the icebreakers, but it was wider than the actual channel, of course. And the amateur pilot had no faintest conception of the handling of an eighty-five-thousand-ton ship.
Things were not normal then. There was a forty-five-mile wind, and the ship was loaded abnormally; she was top-heavy. And she struck a great rock. Normally she would have come to instant rest, with a small ten-foot hole in her hull. The amateur pilot had the engines at half speed, and, in desperation, he had thrown them to full speed ahead, as he saw the danger, and tried to cut the wheel as though she were a motor boat.
The Atlantic's metal, weakened by the strange force, ripped open for two hundred and ninety-four feet. She sank in fourteen and a half seconds, and rolled on her side, off the ledge of rock, and into the deep water the amateur had almost succeeded in reaching.
Perhaps two thousand might have been saved from the part still unsubmerged. Ships were starting out after them. But the hull sloped, and some slid, for under that howling wind, ice froze in seconds. They fought, and a total of one hundred and seventy-four were saved.
And rumor had been right. The Atlantic was the last ship to sail from New York, for her wreck blocked the channel, and the wind howled down from the north all that day and all the next so that no well-equipped salvage ship could cut her out of the way, and for that matter it howled all the rest of the days, but that was not important. The ice in the harbor was fourteen feet thick on the morning of the 12th.
London was blocked on the 21st, Baltimore on the 22nd. And the seas of all the world steamed, and the winds, blowing over them, were warmed to some slight extent, so that New York did not have temperatures below -72 until July 3rd, when a northwest gale swept, not from the Atlantic, but all across frozen Canada, and the water in the mains fifty feet below the street froze.
Fire started that day, and ravaged unchecked, till the solid walls of stone and ice it encountered succeeded in damping it, and the wind blew it out again, as it had fanned it before.
Men had learned to be careful by that time, and no one worked even slightly harder than normal. Tens of thousands had died horribly as the automatic muscles of their hearts strained to pump the blood harder-and tore themselves to pieces.
"If," said Tad Albrite desperately, "you don't do something fairly quickly, there won't be any sense in trying. You can't get equipment to do anything in another two weeks."
Ban Torrence looked up bitterly. His eyes were tired and dead. "Will you go
away? It's atomic power. I'm after it. If I get it, I can do something, and I won't need so much equipment. If I don't, I won't need any, anyway."
"Atomic power!" gasped Albrite. His voice trailed off as he said it, trailed off into hopelessness. "They've tried for decades."
Torrence motioned toward a massive piece of apparatus on one side of the laboratory. "Almost!" He sighed. "So shut up and let me work."
Albrite rose to look at the thing. Two feet long, a semicylinder. Ruddy copper bars led from it to huge electrolytic condenser banks and a bank of powerful accumulators. And to a further piece of apparatus. Silently he looked at it, then went to the closet, put on his heavy robes, and stepped out into the cold toward the observatory and Jack Ribly.
It was several hours later when he returned. Ban Torrence was fussing with his apparatus again. He looked up at their entrance.
"Hello! I wish you'd look at these blasted circuits again, Ribly, and you, too, Tad. I swear it ought to work. It almost did for a fraction of a second."
"Have you tried it again?" asked Ribly.
"No. 'Fraid it might blow up this time instead of stopping."
"Who cares? Try it," snapped Ribly.
"What ought it to do?" asked Albrite.
"Release atomic energy-not all of it, just smash the atom to parts and collect the energy of the parts. Enough, though, for what we want."
"Try it. We can't lose much," Albrite said. "What are you going to do with the power if it works? How will it help?"
"It will help. I think-I think that Earth and the solar system-just an atom in a greater universe. But they're releasing atomic energy in that greater universe- and we're the atom! If my theory's right, then I can release atomic energy myself and stop their release of our energy by just slightly upsetting their field, so that it passes by, harmless. Not a terrific amount of energy needed. The field would spread out from this apparatus here-if it would work-at the speed of light.
"In a second, things would be normal on Earth. In four, the Moon would start coming back. In a few minutes, the Sun's old gravity would be returned, the system balanced. Then the thing would spread till all the universe was reestablished.
"I really slightly invert their energy, so that it destroys itself. It would be a spreading sphere of neutralization, self-propagating, feeding on the thing it destroyed. I would have to add no more energy to clear all the universe we know of that force.
"You know-the force is ages old. To that superuniverse, the whole process we've been undergoing for the last months is perhaps a million billionth of a second. The thing has been going on for ages. That is why we have seen distant nebulae rush away-to eternal destruction. The evaporation of their atomic fuel as we felt the first fringes of their power. Now we are in the heart of their release. If I can do this, I suppose they will never know what has happened.
"But I tried the thing, and the blasted thing worked for perhaps a hundredth of a second, just long enough to kick my instruments and show it worked, but not long enough to start that field.
"Shall I try again?"
"I say yes," replied Ribly.
Mutely, Tad Albrite nodded.
Ban Torrence walked over to his controls. Slowly, thoughtfully, he set up the switches. For perhaps thirty seconds of silence he waited with the last switch in his hand.
"If this works we shall be most fortunate-"
His voice was drowned by the sudden titanic discharges rushing into the generator. For scarcely a thousandth of a second it continued before the process, restarted, backed up, and stopped the discharge into it. The generator functioned perfectly.
For an infinitesimal fragment of a second, a strange nausea swept them as the wave of the counterfield drove out, swift as light, into all the universe. Ban Torrence riveted his eyes on the wall clock, the clock that had swung its pendulum with a strange lethargy, as though not interested in keeping up with time. It was ticking suddenly, with a regular, swift stroke.
"Thank Heaven-it works!" said Torrence softly. For a moment his eyes looked toward and through the mass of the machine, crouched in hulked, latent power, the massive conductors leading off in gleaming, ruddy columns. "I wonder," he went on very softly, "if, in some vaster world, they even knew-as this particular atom of fuel simply refused to disintegrate."
Then abruptly the scientist in him rebelled. "But why in blazes didn't it work before? I didn't change the thing in the slightest. The same fuel-water-the same generator. Just took it apart and put it back together again exactly as before. I can't see why."
"Was the water pure?" asked Albrite. "Maybe it wasn't-and when you took it apart the drop which caused the trouble was ejected, the generator cleared,. and now it will function for another period, until another drop which can't be disintegrated hits it."
"Maybe so; somehow I doubt it. That particular drop simply wouldn't break down. I can't understand why. Just that the generator must have stopped abruptly and could not be restarted till cleared of the charge contained.
"Anyway, it's working perfectly now."
Torrence looked at it, and though he might have told those scientists of a greater world why their machines failed occasionally, since he knew much that they did not, he did not understand all that went on within an atomic generator.
Only he knew that he had restored Earth; that even now she, and her satellite, must be circling toward each other, and toward the Sun; that he had found the secret of vast power that would warm the frozen peoples and power their industry as Earth thawed out once more.