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

the human race qualified for membership in that Federation. To qualify, humans had to
develop a means of driving spaceships faster than the speed of light.

This was no small order. According to the physics developed by Albert Einstein, the speed
of light represented the greatest velocity possible in the universe, roughly one hundred
eighty-six thousand miles per second. But even at that speed, interstellar distances were
so great that it would take three or four years to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest
worthwhile star to Earth. To reach the center of the galaxy would take twenty-
five to thirty thousand years. But the Aliens, apparently, could make that trip in a few days
at most. Earth must learn how to do likewise. A towering scientific problemтАФbut how could
the difficulties involved be explained to visitors at Research Three who thought Antarctica
was a long way off?

"I'll get busy right away," said Jim, guiltily. "FirstтАФwhat?"

"One of the tiger sharks, I thinkтАФOld Susy," answered Taub. "Shunt her into the main pool
here." He waved a hand at the fifty by twenty feet of four-foot-deep tank alongside him, with
the massive, camera-eyed shape of the time-gap transmitter straddling it on arching steel
legs. "Maybe we can get through the sharks and down to the turtles, or something else
harmless by the time the visitors show up. If I'm asked one more time why we don't have
muzzles on the sharks, or whether the octopi eat people, I'll quit and take a teaching job."

He looked at the time-gap transmitter, hanging over the center of the pool.

"Well, off to the salt mines," he said, beginning to climb up the ladder mounted to one of
the legs of the transmitter. "Maybe we can get through in time. Get her moving, Jim."

Jim went to the tanks that held the fish and water animals. He cornered Old Susy with one
of the shark tank's movable partitions, and shunted her into the water corridor leading to
the experimental tank. After that it was a matter of merely herding her down the

SPACE WINNERS

15

corridor and into the tank itself by sliding a partition along behind her. Used to this process
as she was, Susy hardly waited to be urged. She was called Old Susy not because she was
oldтАФthough at a length of twelve feet she was respectably grown up as tiger sharks wentтАФ
but because she had been around longer than any other of the sharks they were using as
experimental subjects.

Susy swam out into the main tank and began to cruise around after the fashion of sharks
whoтАФlacking the swim bladder of ordinary fishesтАФhave to keep moving to keep from
sinking. Taub rolled the transmitter back and forth over its tracks on either side of the pool,
occasionally transmitting an impulse of time-lessness of constantly varying duration into
Susy's tiny "Y"-shaped brain.

Jim left the poolside to go about his main work of cleaning the tanks and cages, feeding
and checking over the experimental animalsтАФwhich ranged from sharks to spider
monkeys. But it was a day of troubles. He was just beginning to drain and hose down the