"Tom Reamy - San Diego Lightfoot Sue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reamy Tom)

radioactives might never have been joined. There might never have been developed the fabulous T. S.
Edison battery, which is the prime mover of all today's surface and air traffic. Those pioneering electric
tracks introduced by the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia might have remained an expensive
freak. And the gas helium might never have been produced industrially to supplement earth's meager
subterranean supply."

My son's eyes brightened with the flame of pure scholarship. "Papa," he said eagerly, "you are a genius
yourself! You have precisely hit on what is perhaps the most important of those cusp-events I referred to.
I am at this moment finishing the necessary research for a long paper on it. Do you know, Papa, that I
have firmly established by researching Parisian records that there was in 1894 a close personal
relationship between Marie Sklodowska and her fellow radium researcher Pierre Curie, and that she
might well have become Madame CurieтАФor perhaps Madame Becquerel, for he too was in that
workтАФif the dashing and brilliant Edison had not most opportunely arrived in Paris in December 1894 to
sweep her off her feet and carry her off to the New World to even greater achievements?

"And just think, Papa," he went on, his eyes aflame, "what might have happened if their son's battery had
CATCH THAT ZEPPELIN! 1Q

not been inventedтАФthe most difficult technical achievement hedged by all sorts of seeming scientific
impossibilities, in the entire millennium-long history of industry. Why, Henry Ford might have
manufactured automobiles powered by steam or by exploding natural gas or conceivably even vaporized
liquid gasoline, rather than the mass-produced electric cars which have been such a boon to mankind
everywhereтАФnot our smokeless cars, but cars spouting all sorts of noxious fumes to pollute the
environment."

Cars powered by the danger-fraught combustion of vaporized liquid gasoline!тАФit almost made me
shudder and certainly it was a fantastic thought, yet not altogether beyond the bounds of possibility, I had
to admit.
Just then I noticed my gloomy, black-clad Jew sitting only two tables away from us, though how he had
got himself into the exclusive Krahenest was a wonder. Strange that I had missed his entryтАФprobably
immediately after my own, while I had eyes only for my son. His presence somehow threw a dark though
only momentary shadow over my bright mood. Let him get some good German food inside him and
some fine German wine, I thought generouslyтАФit will fill that empty belly of his and even put a bit of a
good German smile into those sunken Yiddish cheeks! I combed my little mustache with my thumbnail
and swept the errant lock of hair off my forehead.

Meanwhile my son was saying, "Also, Father, if electric transport had not been developed, and if during
the last decade relations between Germany and the United States had not been so good, then we might
never have gotten from the wells in Texas the supply of natural helium our zeppelins desperately needed
during the brief but vital period before we had put the artificial creation of helium onto an industrial
footing. My researchers at Washington have revealed that there was a strong movement in the
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FWTZ LEIBEH

U.S. military to ban the sale of helium to any other nation, Germany in particular. Only the powerful
influence of Edison, Ford, and a few other key Americans, instantly brought to bear, prevented that
stupid injunction. Yet if it had gone through, Germany might have been forced to use hydrogen instead of
helium to float her passenger dirigibles. That was another crucial cusp."