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

protesting that he had worked a miracle without being able to explain it. Using his
prestige, which was world-wide, Mendelsohn called in two scientists to get to the
bottom of the matter and, if possible, turn the apparatus into something more
exploitable upon the vaudeville stage.

The scientists came with open minds, looked and saw, tested and retested,
checked and rechecked, summoned six other specialists. A slight atmosphere of
hysteria developed in the Blieder home as yet more experts were brought in.
Finally Blieder himself, frightened and exhausted by the general hullabaloo,
handed over his apparatus in return for a guarantee of five percent of whatever
profit could be made out of it plus a solemn promise-on which he was most
insistent-that the new principle he'd discovered would bear his name forever-
more.

Ten months later Blieder died without giving himself time to receive a rake-off.
Eleven years afterward the first ship went up powered with what was dutifully
called the Blieder-drive. It made hay of astronomical distances and astronautical-
principles, put an end once and for all to the theory that nothing could exceed the
velocity of light.

The entire galaxy shrank several times faster than Earth had shrunk when the
airplane was invented. Solar systems once hopelessly out of reach now came
within easy grasping distance. An immense concourse of worlds presented
themselves for the mere taking and fired the imaginations of swarming humanity.
Overcrowded Terra found itself offered the cosmos on a platter and was swift to
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seize the opportunity.

A veritable spray of Blieder-driven ships shot outward as every family, cult,
group or clique that imagined it could do better someplace else took to the star-
trails. The restless, the ambitious, the malcontents, the martyrs, the eccentrics, the
antisocial, the fidgety and the just plain curious, away they fled by the dozens,
hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands.

In less than a century fifty percent of the human race left aged and autocratic
Terra and blew itself all over the star-field, settling wherever they could give free
vent to their ideas and establish their prejudices. This was the end-product of the
obsession of a penny-levitator. It was written down in history as The Great
Explosion.

It weakened Terra for four hundred years. Then came the time to pick up the bits
and piecesтАж

Chapter 1
In the days when spaceships had been squirted along by vaporized boron sludge
or by cesium-ion jets their size had been restricted by the limits of power
available. The relation of payload to exhaust velocity was something no designer