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

I pulled in to the side of the highway and opened the envelope I had been given:


'Report to:
Prof. T. Galbraith,
Nucleonics Faculty,
Proton-synchrotron Laboratory,
 Lake Valley University,
Lake Valley, Tennessee,'


the instructions read.
I opened the flap of the envelope again and tipped it, waiting for whatever else would come out in the
shape of travel orders, time-schedules, ancilliary instructions, or explanations. There was nothing. I
squeezed the envelope open and looked in it.
I was on my own. I was not even told how, when or by what route, I should arrive. They could leave
it, naturally, to a man in my position. They may even have thought: 'He has a car. He will have his limited
serviceman's belongings in the car. It will be easier for him to drive there.' But they did not usually do
that. They had ways of studying the individual, but they were not those ways. When I was posted to
Canaveral, I was ordered to fly there, and it was left to me to collect my car the next time I had time
available in the shape of leave, or to have it sent on as freight. With some of us, in our service, they had
cultivated an almost deliberate blindness.
To hell, I thought. I could go on a blind. I could disappear for a week or two. After being tensed up
for so long, it was a big temptation.
Instead, I started the car and drove on to the nearest town. I found an hotel and used their hall. I had
them put through a person-to-person call to Professor T. Galbraith and tell me when they got him. I sat
waiting in their lounge. I was going nowhere. Maybe the 'they' who ran my life, having selected me for
one job, knew exactly what I would do.
'Professor T. Galbraith?' I said to the phone. 'This is a Major Howard Judgen. I've been told to
report to you. Just when exactly do you want me? '
The voice at the other end took me in its stride. He might have been arranging delivery for a
refrigerator or a cooker.
'Tomorrow, Major? Can you make it at least by Thursday?'
He spoke of me as about some item of equipment that he would be needing shortly and intended
soon to use.
'So soon?' I said.
'I don't mind, Major.' He seemed surprised. 'But don't you think you'd better look at it before you
risk your neck for us?'

CHAPTER THREE
We were standing in an illuminated rock tunnel, deep-hewn in the cliff-face below the hillside. We were
far back from what I understood to be the business end of the proton-synchrotron, at what they called
the start-end of the linear accelerator, in air-conditioned chambers underground, when the red-headed
young man called William Strassen put his hand on my arm and said:
'This is almost the classic case of scientific discovery, Judgen. You have to know what is involved to
understand it. You have to know of what his greatness consists. In Galbraith's case it was a question of
his position, as chief and mentor of all of us here, and his status as a scientist. He was endowed with a
research tool costing a hundred million of the Government's money. But that was not enough. That was a
beginning. The time came when the research tool, all this that you see here, these excavations, the
synchrotron, the hydro-electric generators producing power enough to feed a major town, and all to his