"Phillip Francis Nowlan - Buck Rogers 01 - Armageddon 2419" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nowlan Philip Francis)

dirigible in its coat of low-visibility paint.
"Seven thousand feet up," Wilma whispered, crouching close to me. "Watch."
 The ship was about the same shape as the great dirigibles of the 20th Century that I had seen, but
without the suspended control car, engines, propellors; rudders or eleyating planes. As it loomed
rapidly nearer, I saw that it was wider and somewhat flatter than I had supposed.
Now I could see the repellor rays that held the ship aloft, like searchlight beams faintly visible in the bright
daylight (and still faintly visible to the human eye at night). Actually, I had been informed by my
instructors, there were two rays. The visible one was generated by the ship's apparatus, and directed
toward the ground as a beam of "carrier" impulses. The true repellor ray, the complement of the other in
one sense, induced by the action of the "carrier" reacted in a concentrating upward direction from the
mass of the earth. It became successively electronic, atomic and finally molecular, in its na-hire,
according to various ratios of distance between earth mass and "carrier" source, until, in the last analysis,
the ship itself actually was supported on an upward rushing column of air, much like a ball continuously
supported on a fountain jet.
The raider neared with incredible speed. Its rays were both slanted astern at a sharp angle, so that it
slid forward with tremendous momentum.
The ship was operating two disintegrator rays, though only a casual, intermittent fashion. But whenever
they flashed downward with blinding brilliancy, forest, rocks and ground melted instantaneously into
nothing where they played upon them.
When later I inspected the scars left by these rays I found them some five feet deep and thirty feet
wide, the exposed surfaces being lava-like in texture, but of a pale, iridescent, greenish hue.
No systematic use of the rays was made by the ship, however, until it reached a point over the center of
the valley-the center of the community's activities. There it carne to a sudden stop by shooting its
repellor beams sharply forward and easing them back gradually to the vertical, holding the ship floating
and motionless. Then the work of destruction began systematically.
Back and forth traveled the destroying rays, plough-ing parallel furrows from hillside to hillside. We
gasped in dismay. Wilma and I, as time after time we saw it plough through sections where we knew
camps or plants were located.
"This is awful," she moaned, a terrified question in her eyes. "How could they know the location so
exactly, Tony? Did you see? They were never in doubt. They stalled at a predetermined spot-and-and it
was exactly the right spot"
I We did not talk of what might happen if the rays were turned in our direction. We both knew. We
would simply disintegrated in a split second into mere scattered electronic vibrations. Strangely enough, it
was this self-reliant girl of the 25th Centrry, who clung to me-a relatively primitive man of the 20th, less
familiar than she with the thought of this terrifying possibility-for moral support
We knew that many of our companions must have been whisked into absolute non-existence before
our eyes in these few moments. The whole thing paralyzed us into mental and physical immobility for I
do not know how long.
It couldn't have been long, however, for the rays had not ploughed more than thirty of their
twenty-foot furrows or so across the valley, when I regained control of myself, and brought Wilma to
herself by shaking her roughly.
"How far will this rocket gun shoot, Wilma?" I demanded, drawing my pistol.
"It depends on your rocket, Tony. It will take even the longest range rocket, but you could shoot more
accu rately from a longer tube. But why? You couldn't penetrate the shell of that ship with rocket force,
even if you could reach it"
I fumbled clumsily with my rocket pouch, for I was excited. I had an idea I wanted to try. With
Wilma's help, I selected the longest range explosive rocket in my pouch, and fitted it to my pistol.
"It won't carry seven thousand feet, Tony," Wilma objected. But I took aim carefully. It was another
thought that I had in my mind. The supporting repellor ray, I had been told, became molecular in
character at what was called a logarithmic level of five (below that it was a purely electronic "flow" or