"Eric Frank Russel - The Great Explosion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

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Proofed more or less by Highroller.

Made prettier by MollyKate's/Cinnamon's style sheet.

Dedicated to all those who believe that there is a happy land far, far away.

PROLOGUE
When an explosion takes place lots of bits and pieces fly all over the scenery. The
greater the wallop the larger the lumps and the farther they travel. These are
fundamental facts known to every schoolchild old enough to have some sneaky
suspicions about the birds and the bees. They were not known or perhaps they
were not fully realized by Johannes Pretorius van der Camp Blieder despite the
fact that he was fated to create the biggest bang in human history.

Johannes Etc. Blieder was a lunatic of the same order as Unk (who first made
fire), Wunk (who designed the wheel), Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, the Wright
Brothers and many others who have outraged orthodoxy by achieving the
impossible. He was a shrimp of a man with a partly bald head, a ragged goatee
beard and weak, watery eyes hugely magnified by pebble-lensed spectacles. He
shuffled around on splayed feet with the gait of a pregnant duck, who had been
making glutinous sniffs since birth and never knew where to put his hand on a
handkerchief.

Of academic qualifications he had none whatever. A spaceship bound for the
Moon or Venus could thunder overhead as such ships had done for a thousand
years and he would peer at it myopically without the vaguest notion of what
pushed it along. What's more, he wasn't the least bit interested in finding out. Four
hours per day, four days per week, he sat at an office desk. The rest of his time
was devoted wholly and with appalling single-mindedness to the task of levitating
a penny. Wealth or power or shapely women had no appeal to him. Except when
hunting a handkerchief his entire life was dedicated to what he deemed the
ultimate triumph, namely, that of being able to exhibit a coin floating in mid-air.

A psychologist might explain this obsession in terms of an experience that Blieder

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had suffered while resting in his mother's womb. An alienist might define it as the
pathological desire of a sniffy-nosed little man to rise high in the world and look
big. If he had been capable of self-analysis-which he was not-Blieder may have
confessed the thwarted ambition to become an accomplished vaudeville artist.
Though he knew nothing and cared less about the wonders of science he did nurse
a mighty admiration for professional magicians and illusionists. To him, the