"Homer Eon Flint - The Lord Of Death And The Queen Of Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flint Homer Eon)

engineer; he could not spare much wind while clambering about the machinery,
oil-can in hand. The architect, alone, ignored the famous tune.
"What I can't understand, Smith," he insisted, "is how you draw the
electricity
from the ether into this car without blasting us all to cinders."
The engineer squinted through an opal glass shutter into one of the tunnels,
through which the anti-gravitation current was pouring. "If you didn't know
any
more about buildings than you do about machinery, Jackson," he grunted,
because
of his squatting position, "I'd hate to live in one of your houses!"
The architect smiled grimly. "You're living in one of 'em right now, Smith,"
said he; "that is, if you call this car a house."
Smith straightened up. He was an unimportant-looking man, of medium height
and
build, and bearing a mild, good-humored expression. Nobody would ever look at
him twice, would ever guess that his skull concealed an unusually complete
knowledge of electricity, mechanisms, and such practical matters.
"I told you yesterday, Jackson," he said, "that the air surrounding the earth
is
chock full of electricity. AndтАФ"
"And that the higher we go, the more juice," added the other, remembering.
"As
much as to say that it is the atmosphere, then, that protects the earth from
the
surrounding voltage."
The engineer nodded. "Occasionally it breaks through, anyhow, in the form of
lightning. Now, in order to control that current, and prevent it from turning
this machine, and us, into ashes, all we do is to pass the juice through a
cylinder of highly compressed air, fixed in this wall. By varying the
pressure
and dampness within the cylinder, we can regulate the flow."
The builder nodded rapidly. "All right. But why doesn't the electricity
affect
the walls themselves? I thought they were made of steel."
The engineer glanced through the dead-light at the reddish disk of the Earth,
hazy and indistinct at a distance of forty million miles. "It isn't steel;
it's
a non-magnetic alloy. Besides, there's a layer of crystalline sulphur between
the alloy and the vacuum space."
"The vacuum is what keeps out the cold, isn't it?" Jackson knew, but he asked
in
order to learn more.
"Keeps out the sun's heat, too. The outer shell is pretty blamed hot on that
side, just as hot as it is cold on the shady side." Smith seated himself
beside
a huge electrical machine, a rotary converter which he next indicated with a
jerk of his thumb. "But you don't want to forget that the juice outside is no
use to us, the way it is. We have to change it.
"It's neither positive nor negative; it's just neutral. So we separate it