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

greatest glory would be to hold the stage and dumbfound an audience with a
series of clever stunts that were not faked, but real.

The actual truth, perhaps, was that bountiful Providence had chosen him to get
somewhere in much the same way that other creative imbeciles have been chosen.
Therefore he was animated by a form of precognition, a subconscious knowledge
that success was sure if he kept after it long enough. So for fifty years he strove to
levitate a penny by methods mental, mechanical or just plain loopy.

Upon his seventy-second birthday he succeeded. The coin positioned itself three-
eighths of an inch above a pure cobalt disc that represented the output stage of a
piece of apparatus bearing no relation to anything that made sense. He did not
rush outdoors, yell the news all over town, get blind drunk and paw a few elderly
virgins. Instead he blinked incredulously at the penny, sniffed a couple of times,
sought in vain for a handkerchief. Then he stacked a dozen more pennies on top
of the floater. It made no difference. The column remained poised with a three-
eighths gap between the bottom coin and the cobalt disc.

Removing the coins, he substituted a heavy paperweight. The gap did not
decrease by a hairbreadth. So he took away the weight and the penny, wondered
whether a different metal would produce a different effect, tried it with his gold
watch. That also sat three-eighths of an inch above the disc. He fiddled around
with his apparatus, making minor alterations here and there in the hope of
widening the gap. At one stage the watch vibrated but did not rise or fall. He
concentrated on that point, adjusting and readjusting, until he was rewarded with a
sound like a sharp spit. The watch vanished, leaving a small hole in the ceiling
and a matching hole in the roof.

For the next fourteen months Johannes Pretorius van der Camp Blieder struggled
to master his brain-child. Knowing nothing of scientific methods his efforts were
determined by guess and by God. In the end he had made every portable item in
the house, metallic or non-metallic, float at an altitude of three-eighths of an inch

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or take off heavenward so fast that it could not be seen to go.

The time had come, he decided, to seek the aid of another and more agile brain.
Characteristically, it did not occur to him to appeal to the department of physics of
the nearest university. Instead he wrote to The Magnificent Mendelsohn, a top-
flight illusionist. This was fortunate; a scientist would have dismissed him as just
another crazy inventor whereas Mr. Mendelsohn, as a professional deceiver, was
only too willing to take a look at any new swindle in the hope that he could
improve upon it and confiscate it for his very own.

In due time Mr. Mendelsohn arrived wearing a theatrical black cloak and a
cynical smile. He spent three exasperating days trying to determine exactly how
the trick was done. Blieder was no help; he hung around snuffling continually and