"Ursula K. LeGuin - The New Atlantis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

emis-sionтАж" through his nose, with his eyes narrowed, and his mind evidently going light-years per
second faster than his tongue, because he kept beginning over and saying "The e-lec-tron emis-sionтАж"
and pumping his elbows.

Intellectuals at work are very strange to look at. As strange as artists. I never could understand how an
audience can sit there and look at a fiddler rolling his eyes and biting his tongue, or a horn player
collect-ing spit, or a pianist like a black cat strapped to an electrified bench, as if what they saw had
anything to do with the music.

I damped the fires with a quart of black-market beerтАФthe legal kind is better, but I never have enough
ration stamps for beer; I'm not thirsty enough to go without eatingтАФand gradually Max and Simon
cooled down. Max would have stayed talking all night, but I drove him out because Simon was looking
tired.

I put a new battery in the radio and left it playing in the bathroom, and blew out the candle and lay and
talked with Simon; he was too excited to sleep. He said that Max had solved the problems that were
bothering them before Simon was sent to Camp, and had fitted Simon's equations to (as Simon put it) the
bare facts, which means they have achieved "direct energy conversion." Ten or twelve people have
worked on it at different times since Simon published the theoretical part of it when he was twenty-two.
The physicist Ann Jones had pointed out right away that the simplest practical application of the theory
would be to build a "sun tap," a device for collecting and storing solar energy, only much cheaper and
better than the USG Sola-Heetas that some rich people have on their houses. And it would have been
simple only they kept hitting the same snag. Now Max has got around the snag.

I said that Simon published the theory, but that is inaccurate. Of course he's never been able to publish
any of his papers in print; he's not a federal employee and doesn't have a government clearance. But it
did get circulated in what the scientists and poets call Sammy's-dot, that is, just handwritten or
hectographed. It's an old joke that the FBI arrests everybody with purple fingers, because they have
either been hectographing Sammy's-dots, or they have impetigo.

Anyhow, Simon was on top of the mountain that night. His true joy is in the pure math; but he had been
working with Clara and Max and the others in this effort to materialize the theory for ten years, and a
taste of material victory is a good thing, once in a lifetime.

I asked him to explain what the sun tap would mean to the masses, with me as a representative mass. He
explained that it means we can tap solar energy for power, using a device that's easier to build than a jar
battery. The efficiency and storage capacity are such that about ten minutes of sunlight will power an
apartment complex like ours, heat and lights and elevators and all, for twenty-four hours; and no
pollution, particulate, thermal, or radioactive. "There isn't any danger of using up the sun?" I asked. He
took it soberlyтАФit was a stupid question, but after all not so long ago people thought there wasn't any
danger of using up the earthтАФand said no, because we wouldn't be pulling out energy, as we did when
we mined and lumbered and split atoms, but just using the energy that comes to us anyhow, as the plants,
the trees and grass and rosebushes always have done. "You could call it Flower Power," he said. He was
high, high up on the mountain, ski-jumping in the sunlight.

"The State owns us," he said, "because the corporative State has a monopoly on power sources, and
there's not enough power to go around. But now, anybody could build a generator on their roof that
would furnish enough power to light a city."

I looked out the window at the dark city.