"Jerry Oltion - The Miracle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

electroscope, please."

Greg reached into the pack and brought out the glass ball with the metal rod
piercing its side. Inside the sphere, a thin gold leaf stood out at right angles
from the rigid plate at the end of the rod. Dr. Richards took it from Greg,
turned to the cameras, and said, "An electroscope detects the presence of a
static electrical charge. The farther out the gold leaf extends, the greater the
charge. As you can see, we're in the presence of quite a charge indeed."

The woman pushed into camera range. "You have no power here!" she shouted. "This
is holy ground."

"It's a public park," Dr. Richards said. "And it looks to me like there's plenty
of power here for all of us." To Greg he said, "How about the grounding wire?"

Greg took the coil of 10-gauge house wiring out of the pack. They'd only brought
fifteen feet of it, not expecting nearly as big a display as now flickered and
spat before them, but Dr. Richards took it from him and uncoiled it anyway. It
was stiff material; it had three thick conductors shrouded in heavy insulation
and it would stick out about three feet before it bent under its own weight. He
held one end as high as he could over his head, and extended the other end
toward the bush.

"Don't!" all three of the bible-thumpers shouted, and about half the crowd
echoed them.

Dr. Richards ignored them all. "Stand back," he warned. "This shouldn't be
dangerous, but you never know." And with those words, he stuck the lower end of
the wire into the ground at the base of the flickering, spark-spitting bush.

The display immediately went out, to reappear at the top of the conductor, a
glowing spherical corona discharge three feet over the professor's upraised
hand. Coming from a wire, the blue glow and flying sparks seemed almost normal.

Looking just a little like Thor, the god of thunder, Dr. Richards turned to face
the cameras again and said, "There you have it. Definitely an electrical
discharge."

The bible-thumpers, sensing that they were about to lose their hold on things,
shouted, "These people are blasphemers! Stop them from desecrating the Lord's
holy work!"

Not everyone in the crowd was a religious fanatic, but enough of them were.
Roaring like a football audience when the home team scores a touchdown, they
surged forward, the people in the rear pushing over the ones in front who didn't
get out of the way. The woman preacher lunged for Dr. Richards, but he lowered
the upraised end of the wire and forced her back with a shower of sparks. Greg
and the reporters moved in closer to him while the two camera operators stood
back to back like two besieged cavalrymen in Indian country and aimed their
cameras at the crowd.