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

There was no compass bearing to it. It was not brighter in the east. There was no east or west.
There was only up and down, below and above. Below was dark. The blue light came from above.
Brightness fell. Beneath, where the shaking thunder had stilled, the brightness died away through
violet into blindness.

We, arising, watched light fall.

In a way it was more like an ethereal snowfall than like a sunrise. The light seemed to be in
discrete particles, infinitesimal flecks, slowly descending, faint, fainter than flecks of fine snow on
a dark night, and tinier; but blue. A soft, penetrating blue tending to the violet, the color of the
shadows in an iceberg, the color of a streak of sky between gray clouds on a winter afternoon
before snow: faint in intensity but vivid in hue: the color of the remote, the color of the cold, the
color farthest from the sun.

***

On Saturday night they held a scientific congress in our room. Clara and Max came, of course, and the
engineer Phil Drum and three others who had worked on the sun tap. Phil Drum was very pleased with
himself because he had actually built one of the things, a solar cell, and brought it along. I don't think it
had occurred to either Max or Simon to build one. Once they knew it could be done they were satisfied
and wanted to get on with something else. But Phil unwrapped his baby with a lot of flourish, and people
made remarks like, "Mr. Watson, will you come here a minute," and "Hey, Wilbur, you're off the
ground!" and "I say, nasty mould you've got there, Alec; why don't you throw it out?" and "Ugh, ugh,
burns, burns, wow, ow," the latter from Max, who does look a little pre-Mousterian. Phil explained that
he had exposed the cell for one minute at four in the afternoon up in Washington Park during a light rain.
The lights were back on on the West Side since Thursday, so we could test it without being conspicuous.

We turned off the lights, after Phil had wired the table-lamp cord to the cell. He turned on the lamp
switch. The bulb came on, about twice as bright as before, at its full forty wattsтАФcity power of course
was never full strength. We all looked at it. It was a dime-store table lamp with a metallized gold base
and a white plasticloth shade.
"Brighter than a thousand suns," Simon murmured from the bed.

"Could it be," said Clara Edmonds, "that we physicists have known sinтАФand have come out the other
side?"

"It really wouldn't be any good at all for making bombs with," Max said dreamily.

"Bombs," Phil Drum said with scorn. "Bombs are obsolete. Don't you realize that we could move a
mountain with this kind of power? I mean pick up Mount Hood, move it, and set it down. We could
thaw Antarctica, we could freeze the Congo. We could sink a continent. Give me a fulcrum and I'll move
the world. Well, Archimedes, you've got your fulcrum. The sun."

"Christ," Simon said, "the radio, Belle!"

The bathroom door was shut and I had put cotton over the bug, but he was right; if they were going to go
ahead at this rate, there had better be some added static. And though I liked watching their faces in the
clear light of the lampтАФthey all had good, interesting faces, well worn, like the handles of wooden tools
or the rocks in a running streamтАФI did not much want to listen to them talk tonight. Not because I wasn't
a scientist; that made no difference. And not because I disagreed or disapproved or disbelieved anything