"E. E. Doc Smith - Skylark 1 - Skylark of Space " - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

heard one. You'd better lay off the stuff, whatever it is.'

Seeing that Seaton was paying no attention to him, Scott left the room, shaking his head.

Seaton walked slowly to his desk, picked up his blackened and battered briar pipe, and
sat down. What could possibly have happened to result in such shattering of all the
natural laws he knew? An inert mass of metal couldn't fly off into space without the
application of a force - in this case an enormous, a really tremendous force - a force
probably of the order of magnitude of atomic energy. But it hadn't been atomic energy.
That was out. Definitely. No hard radiation ... His instruments would have indicated and
recorded a hundredth of a millimicrocurie, and every one of them had sat placidly on
deadcenter zero through the whole show. What was that force?

And where? In the cell? The solution? The bath? Those three places were . . . all the
places there were.

Concentrating all the power of his mind - deaf, dumb, and blind to every external thing -
he sat motionless, with his forgotten pipe clenched between his teeth.

He sat there while most of his fellow chemists finished the day's work and went home;
sat there while the room slowly darkened with the coming of night.

Finally he stood up and turned on the lights. Tapping the stem of his pipe against his
palm, he spoke aloud. `Absolutely the only unusual incidents in this whole job were a
slight slopping over of the solution onto the copper and the short-circuiting of the wires
when I grabbed the beaker ... wonder if it will repeat ....'

He took a piece of copper wire and dipped it into the solution of the mysterious metal.
Upon withdrawing it he saw that the wire had changed its appearance, the X having
apparently replaced a layer of the original metal. Standing well clear of the table, he
touched the wire with the conductors. There was a slight spark, a snap, and it
disappeared. Simultaneously there was a sharp sound, like that made by the impact of a
rifle bullet, and Seaton saw with amazement a small round hole where the wire had gone
completely through the heavy brick wall. There was power - and how! - but whatever it
was, it was a fact. A demonstrable fact.

Suddenly he realized that he was hungry; and, glancing at his watch, saw that it was ten

-2-
o'clock. And he had had a date for dinner at seven with his fiancee at her home, their first
dinner since their engagement! Cursing himself for an idiot, he hastily left the laboratory.
Going down the corridor, he saw that Marc DuQuesne, a fellow research man, was also
working late. He left the building, mounted his motorcycle, and was soon tearing up
Connecticut Avenue toward his sweetheart's home.

On the way, an idea struck him like a blow of a fist. He forgot even his motorcycle, and
only the instinct of the trained rider saved him from disaster during the next few blocks.
As he drew near his destination, however, he made a determined effort to pull himself
together.