"E. E. Doc Smith - The Galaxy Primes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

shield did not weaken.
'You've got a point there, Lola,' he said, going on as though Feber's interruption had not occurred. 'Not that I blame
either Belle or myself. If anything was ever calculated to drive a man nuts, this farce was. As the only female Prime
in the system, Belle should have been in automatically - she had no competition. And to anybody with three brain
cells working the other place lay between you, Lola, and the other three female Ops in the age group.
'But no, Ferber and the rest of the Board - stupidity iiber alles\ - think all us Ops and Primes are psycho and that the
ship will never even lift. So they made a Grand Circus of it. But they succeeded in one thing - with such abysmal
stupidity so rampant I'm getting more and more reconciled to the idea of our not getting back ... at least, not for a
long, long time.' 'Why, they said we had a very good chance...' Lola began. 'Yeah, and they said a lot of even bigger
damn lies than that one. Have you read any of my papers?' 'I'm sorry. I'm not a mathematician.'
'Our motion will be purely at random. If it isn't, 111 eat this whole ship. We won't get back until Jim and I work out
something to steer us with. But they must be wondering no end, outside, what the score is, so I'm willing to call it a
draw -temporarily - and let 'em in again. How about it, Belle?'
'A draw it is - temporarily.' Neither, however, even offered to shake hands.
'Smile pretty, everybody,' Garlock said, and pressed a stud, '...the matter? What's the matter? Oh ... the worried voice
of the System's ace newscaster came in. 'Power failure already1)'
'No.' Garlock replied. 'I figured we had a couple of minutes of privacy coming, if you can understand the meaning of
the word. Now all four of us tell everybody who is watching or
listening au revoir or goodbye, whichever it may turn out to be.' He reached for the switch.
'Wait a minute!' the newscaster demanded. 'Leave it on until the last poss тАФ' His voice broke off sharply.
Turn it back on!' Belle ordered. . 'No.' 'Scared?'
'Exactly. I'm scared purple. So would you be, if you had three brain cells working in that gloryhound's head of yours.
Get set, everybody, and we'll take off.'
'Stop it, both of you!' Lola exclaimed. 'Where do you want us to sit, and do we strap down?'
'You sit here; Belle at that plate beside Jim. Yes, strap down. There probably won't be any shock, and we should land
right side up, but there's no sense in taking chances. Sure your stuff's all aboard?' 'Yes, it's in our rooms.'
The four secured themselves; the two men checked their instruments for the dozenth time. The pilot donned his
scanner. The ship lifted effortlessly, noiselessly. Through the atmosphere; through and far beyond the stratosphere. It
stopped. 'Ready, Clee?' James licked his lips. 'As ready as I ever will be, I guess. Shoot." The pilots's right hand
moved unenthusiastically toward a red button on his panel ... slowed ... stopped. He stared into his scanner at Earth
far below.
'Hit it, Jim!' Oarlock snapped. 'Hit it, for godsake, before we all lose our nerve!'
James stabbed convulsively at the button, and in the very instant of contact - instantaneously, without a fractional
microsecond of time-lapse - their familiar surroundings disappeared. Without any sensation of motion, of
displacement, or of the passage of any time whatsoever, the planet beneath them was no longer their familiar Earth.
The plates showed no familiar stars nor patterns of heavenly bodies. The brightly-shining sun was very evidently not
Sol.
'Well, we went somewhere ... but not to Alpha Centauri, not much to our surprise.' James gulped twice; then went on,
speaking almost jauntily now that the attempt had been made and had failed. 'So now it's up to you, Clee, as Director
of 10
Project Gunther and captain of the good ship Pleiades, to boss the more-or-less simple - more, I hope - job of getting
us back to Tellus.'
Science, both physical and paraphysical, had done its best. Gunther's Theorems, which defined the electromagnetic
and electrogravitic parameters pertaining to the annihilation of distance, had been studied, tested, and applied to the
full. So had the Psionic Corollaries - which, while not having the status of paraphysical laws, did allow computation
of the qualities and magnitudes of the stresses required for any given application of the Gunther Effect.
The planning of the starship Pleiades had been difficult in the extreme, its construction almost impossible. While it
was practically a foregone conclusion that any man of the requisite caliber would already be a member of the
Galaxian Society, the three planets and eight satellites were screened, psiontist by psiontist, to select the two
strongest and most versatile of their breed.