"C M Kornbluth - Gomez" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

We got out at the Federal Building and Gomez spoke at last. He said in surprise: "This, it is not the
hospital!"

Nobody answered. We marched him up the steps and surrounded him in the elevator. It would have
made anybody nervous-it would, have made me nervous-to be herded like that; everybody's got
something on his conscience. But the kid didn't even seem to notice. I decided that he must be a half-wit
or-there came that crazy notion again.

The glass door said "U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Office of Security and Intelligence." The people
behind it were flabbergasted when the admiral and party walked in. He turned the head man out of his
office and sat at his desk, with Gomez getting the caller's chair. The rest of us stationed ourselves
uncomfortably around the room.

It started. The admiral produced the letter and asked in English: "Have you ever seen this before?" He
made it clear from the way he held it that Gomez wasn't going to get his hands on it.

"Si, seguro. I write it last week. This is funny business. I am not really sick like you say, no?" He seemed
relieved.

"No. Where did you get these equations?"

Gomez said proudly: "I work them out."

The admiral gave a disgusted little laugh. "Don't waste my time, boy. Where did you get these
equations?"

Gomez was beginning to get upset. "You got no right to call me liar," he said. "I not so smart as the big
physicists, seguro, and maybe I make mistakes. Maybe I waste the profesor Soo-har-man his time but
he got no right to have me arrest. I tell him right in letter he don't have to answer if he don't want. I make
no crime and you got no right!"
The admiral looked bored. "Tell me how you worked the equations out," he said.

"Okay," said Gomez sulkily. "You know the random paths of neutron is expressed in matrix mechanics
by profesor Oppenheim five years ago, all okay. I transform his equations from path-prediction domain
to cross-section domain and integrate over absorption areas. This gives u series and v series. And from
there, the u-v relationship is obvious, no?"



The admiral, still bored, asked: "Got it?"

I noticed that one of his young men had a shorthand pad out. He said: "Yes."

The admiral picked up the phone and said: "This is MacDonald. Get me Dr. Mines out at Brookhaven
right away." He told Gomez blandly: "Dr. Mines is the chief of the A.E.C. Theoretical Physics Division.
I'm going to ask him what he thinks of the way you worked the equations out. He's going to tell me that
you were just spouting a lot of gibberish. And then you're going to tell me where you really got them."

Gomez looked mixed up and the admiral turned back to the phone. "Dr. Mines? This is Admiral
MacDonald of Security. I want your opinion on the following." He snapped his fingers impatiently and