"Smith, E E 'Doc' - SubSpace Vol 2 - Subspace Encounter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

played an important role in early psionic history.

The Destons and Joneses (psiontists now, too) and Adams went into space in search of
other natural resources. They found everything they sought; and eventually what
Maynard of GalMet wanted most-rhenium, the rarest and costliest ingredient of an
ultra-alloy, Leybyrdite. Deston met Doctor Cecily Byrd, Director of Project Rhenium; a
woman whom Maynard described as "a carrot-topped, freckle-faced, shanty-Irish
mick-with the shape men drool about, with a megavac for a brain and an ice-cube for a
heart."

The source of this rarest of minerals they called Rhenia Four, a hellish planet indeed, one
of its creatures, the "kittyhawks," having teeth and claws of the very alloy MetEnge had
been developing. "Curly" Byrd proved herself able to set up full automation even there.
She was helped by, among others. an engineer named Percival Train, whom she
married. Surprisingly, the Trains also developed psionic abilities, as did Dr. Adams and
his wife Stella, to bring to eight the unmatched psiontists who made up the brains of the
new super starship Explorer.

The remainder of the first volume of this chronicle is devoted to the beginnings of the
Psionic Age on Tellus; the three-pronged conflict between Communism, corrupt labor and
capital, and what became the Galactic Federation; and the unaccountably rapid growth
of psionics through the ninety-five colonized planets.

Volume two continues the chronicle the record of two psionic civilizations.


I - THE GAMESMEN

The Justiciate, composed at that moment of one hundred eighty-three Tellus-type
planets, lay in a part of the Cosmos the very existence of which no mind of the ninety-six
planets of Tellurian civilization had ever envisioned. Not even the farthest ranging
subspaces of either civilization had ever discovered any hint of the presence of the other.
Nevertheless, the Justicians were human beings to the last letter of classification; human
even to the extent of varying in skin color from white through different shades of yellow
and red and brown to almost black. Unlike racial distinctions as they occurred on
Tellurian planets, with different races inhabiting single worlds, normally each world of the
Justiciate was the home of a single race. There was little interracial marriage, joining
lives as they put it-not because any race felt itself superior to any other except for the
insufferable red-brown Garshans-but because most ordinary people never left their home
worlds.

All the Justician planets were linked together by hundreds of subspace freight or
passenger lines and by hundreds of thousands of subspace communications channels.
They were also linked together in that they were ruled by, and were more or less willingly
obedient to, a harsh and dictatorial government known as the Council of Grand Justices;
of which His Magnificence Supreme Grand Justice Sonrathendak Ranjak of Slaar was
the unquestioned and unquestionable BOSS.

The planet Slaar was and is the Justiciate's most populous planet; and the city
Meetyl-On-Slaar; the Justiciate's largest city-population ten and a quarter million-was