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

`I'm awfully sorry, sweetheart, but I couldn't help it. You've got a right to be sore and I

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ought to be kicked from here to there, but are you too sore to let me talk to you for a
couple of minutes?'

`I was never so mad at anybody in my life, until I started getting scared witless. I simply
couldn't and can't believe you'd do anything like that on purpose. Come in.'

He came. She closed the door. He half-extended his arms, then paused, irresolute, like a
puppy hoping for a pat but expecting a kick. She grinned then, and came into his arms.

`But what happened, Dick?' she asked later. `Something terrible, to make you act like
this. I've never seen you act so - so funny.'

`Not terrible, Dotty, just extraordinary. So outrageously extraordinary that before I begin I
wish you'd look me in the eye and tell me if you have any doubts about my sanity'

She led him into the living room, held his face up to the light, and made a pretense of
studying his eyes.

`Richard Ballinger Seaton, I certify that you are entirely sane - quite the sanest man I
ever knew. Now tell me the worst. Did you blow up the Bureau with a C-bomb?'

`Nothing like that,' he laughed. `Just a thing I can't understand. You know I've been
reworking the platinum wastes that have been accumulating for the last ten or fifteen
years.!

'Yes, you told me you'd recovered a small fortune in platinum and some of those other
metals. You thought you'd found a brand-new one. Did you?'

`I sure did. After I'd separated out everything I could identify, there was quite a lot of
something left - something that didn't respond to any tests I knew or could find in the
literature.

`That brings us up to today. As a last resort, because there wasn't anything else left, I
started testing for trans-uranics, and there it was. A stable - almost stable, I mean -
isotope; up where no almost-stable isotopes are supposed to exist. Up where I would've
bet my last shirt no such isotope could possibly exist.

`Well, I was trying to electrolyze it out when the fireworks started. The solution started to
fizz over, so I grabbed the beaker - fast. The wires dropped onto the steam-bath and the
whole outfit, except the beaker, took off out of the window at six or eight times the speed
of sound and in a straight line, without dropping a foot in as far as I could keep it in sight
with a pair of good binoculars. And my hunch is that it's still going. That's what happened.
It's enough to knock any physicist into an outside loop, and with my one-cylinder brain I

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got to thinking about it and simply didn't come to until after ten o'clock. All I can say is,
I'm sorry and I love you. As much as I ever did or could. More, if possible. And I always