"Rex Gordon - The Time Factor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gordon Rex)

seen his picture. Who hasn't. The sight and fact of him there gave me a new idea of the importance of
whatever it was we were trying to do. It put it in a new class.
'Are you a volunteer, Major?' the General asked me.
'I don't know yet, sir,' I told him. 'I don't know what I am volunteering for.'
He grinned, making all those assumptions that Generals are inclined to make.
Secretary Stephens was making an objection to Galbraith, who, to move us to the chairs, was having
his projectionist put the lights out one by one.
'I don't see why you want us to see this film, Professor. Film reports and scientific records of
experiments are surely a matter of evaluation by the experts.'
'Experts aren't deciding whether we send a man instead of cameras next time, Mr. Stephens,'
Galbraith said. For a moment he looked past the Secretary at me, and then at the General beside me. It
was obvious whom he thought would do the deciding. I wondered why the Secretary and the Senator
were there at all. As Reckman had said, I soon found out. We were moving to the chairs. Galbraith's
personality or whatever it was worked. He was treating us as a captive audience.
The Senator and the Secretary were fretting. At their level of government they must have thought it a
departure from custom to begin a conference with an attempt to learn facts directly. 'How am I to tell the
appropriations committee?' the Senator said. 'I can't just tell them that it's a matter of book-keeping, the
transfer to Intelligence of an item of equipment costing a hundred million dollars.'
'You can tell them it's a secret,' Galbraith said. 'We're very secret here. If there are questions, tell
them the truth, that even we don't know quite what we're doing.' And he nodded to his projectionist who
put the final light out. He said: 'Why should we be able to explain it?'
We sat in the dark looking towards the blank screen, not like a conference so much as a university
class that had come to hear a lecture. Then the screen came to life.
I recognized the picture. I had just come from there. It was the big underground laboratory at the
target end of the synchrotron. But Galbraith had to tell the others.
'This is where we actuate the controls and work when the synchrotron is in operation,' he said. 'You
can see that we, the operating staff, are all on one side of a barrier wall. Everything that happens around
the target is dealt with by that robot machinery you can see on the other side. Even this camera that took
these pictures could have been shielded had we thought it necessary.'
The screen showed us a picture of the human operating side of the laboratory as we watched it in the
darkened room. Galbraith himself could be seen in the picture, controlling and observing the experiment.
William Strassen was standing near the barrier wall. Sara Francis was sitting at the control desk watching
the many dials and switches of the synchrotron itself.
 The camera showed her hand hovering over the many dials and switches and then swung up and
showed us a clock on the wall over her head reading three minutes to noon.
'This is an actual experiment,' Galbraith said. 'Our most recent and most rewarding, if you can call it
that. It is what made me call you here. That girl is Sara Francis, a young assistant. We use her because
she has perfectly mastered the art of setting up the situation in which these events happen. I am not telling
you this for human interest. She features later in the film.'
The camera evidently swung again, for the picture of the laboratory swung and we found ourselves
looking across the barrier wall. The screen showed us the target area of the synchrotron. But the 'target',
if it could be called that, at the point the beam would strike, was another camera and a group of
instruments, on a plinth, under an inverted glass bowl or bell-jar.
The other camera was trained back on the laboratory so that while the one that had taken the film we
were seeing saw it, it would in turn look back at our camera, at the clock on the laboratory wall, and at
Sara, Strassen and Galbraith.
'Two cameras watching one another,' Galbraith said. 'And what is more, two clocks.'
The screen showed us a close-up of the camera and instruments inside the bell-jar and one of them
was a clock, the time on which corresponded with that of the clock on the wall of the laboratory.
The other instruments were a thermometer, a barometer, and a radiation meter, all of the recording