"Gordon R. Dickson - Space Winners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

just admitted believing in luck."

"I didn't," Jim banged hard on the bearing ring, to seat it on the gyro shaft. "I don't believe
in luck."
"Carry me home! I give up!" Ward tossed his arms wide and almost went over backward off
the oil can. For a moment he teetered, then he got his feet back on the concrete beneath
him. "What is it when you flip a coin and it can come up either heads or tails? Is that luck,
or isn't it?"

"It isn't." Jim scowled again. "The side that's up when the coin lands depends on the lift
and spin you gave it in flipping. If you could calculate those forces exactly, you could tell
before it landed if it was going to be heads, or tails. Same way with lightning striking. If you
could calculate all the factors, you could tell where it would hit. There's no such thing as
luck, when you get right to it."

"What is there, then?" demanded Ward. "The laws of cause and effect!" growled Jim. They
ended up settling nothing.

"Oh, there you are," said Taub Widerman, as Jim came into Building B at Research Three
the next morning and made his way through the maze of equipment and heavy power
cables involved in Building B's part of the research. Weary-looking, probably from working
to midnight the night before, Jim guessed, the young physicist ran a hand over his already
balding forehead. "I was just going to start without you."

"The new bearing in my gyrostabilizer jammed on the way here," said Jim, apologetically.

His summer job at Research Three was taking care of the animals and fish used by Taub as
experimental subjects. He had stopped on arriving at Building B only long enough to put on
the swimming trunks that were his ordinary working uniform, but he saw now that Taub had
been held up without him.

It was next to impossible for the physicist to direct the time-gap transmitterтАФhis working
toolтАФupon the experimental subjects, while at the same time handling the subjects
themselves. But Taub, Jim saw, had been warming up the transmitter when Jim appeared.
So it was high time Jim was here. Handling the subjects was Jim's jobтАФone he hoped to
keep on a part-time basis after he started at the university this coming fall.

Something special, Taub?" he asked now. "You don't usually need me until I've finished
cleaning the tanks and cages."

"Visitors today," replied Taub briefly. Jim felt his own spirits take a downward elevator ride.
Research Three was not a Federal research project with security regulations to keep
stockholders and other visitors at a distance. It was a private corporation, set up like many
others after the Aliens had shocked Earth by landing squarely in the center of Antarctica
and speaking to the world over some form of transmission which pre-empted every radio or
television circuit operating at the time.

Jim had been only seven then, but he remembered the newspaper headlines. The Aliens
had broken the news to Earth that there was a Federation of intelligent races out among the
stars. Earth, they said, would not be allowed to send its people any further into space until