"Arcady And Boris Strugatsky. Prisoners of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора

Program of Officer's Candidate School and was cramming for his mathematics
and mechanics courses. The diagrams and formulas used in their elementary
ballistics studies puzzled Maxim. He nagged Guy. At first Guy did not
understand what he was driving at. Then, grinning condescendingly, he
explained to Maxim the cosmography of his world. It turned out that the
inhabited island was neither a sphere nor a geoid; in fact, it wasn't a
planet at all.
According to Guy, the inhabited island was the World, the only world in
the universe. Beneath the natives' feet lay the firm surface of the World
Sphere. Above them was a gigantic gaseous sphere of finite volume and
unknown composition, whose physical characteristics were still not
understood. There was a theory that the density of this gas increased
rapidly toward the center of the gaseous bubble and certain mysterious
processes produced periodic changes in the intensity of the World Light,
thus giving day and night. Besides the short-term daily changes in the World
Light, there were long-term changes that generated seasonal fluctuations in
temperature and the seasons themselves. Gravity acted away from the center
of the World Sphere, perpendicular to its surface. In short, the inhabited
island was located on the inner surface of an enormous bubble in an infinite
firmament filling the rest of the universe.
Completely stunned, Maxim began to argue, but it soon became quite
apparent that they did not speak the same language, that it was more
difficult for them to understand each other's thinking than for a staunch
Copernican to understand a follower of Ptolemy. Maxim believed that the
unusual characteristics of this planet's atmosphere were the key to the
matter. In the first place, its unusually high index of refraction lifted up
the horizon and from time immemorial had inspired the natives' peculiar
conception of their land as being neither flat nor convex but concave.
"Stand on the seashore," suggested schoolbooks, "and follow the path of a
ship leaving a pier. At first it will appear to be moving on a plane, but
the further it goes, the higher it will rise, until it vanishes in the
atmospheric haze covering the rest of the World." In the second place, the
atmosphere was very dense and phosphoresced day and night, so that no one
ever saw the stars. Isolated instances of observation of the sun were
recorded in chronicles and served as the basis for countless attempts to
create a World Light theory.
Maxim realized that he was caught in a gigantic trap, that contact with
Earth could not be established until he succeeded in turning inside out the
natural concepts that had developed over thousands of years. Evidently,
attempts had been made to do this, judging from the popular expletive
"massaraksh," which meant, literally, "world inside out." Guy had told him
about an abstract mathematical theory that analyzed the World differently.
The theory was formulated in ancient times, but its adherents had been
persecuted by the official religion, and it had its martyrs. Through the
efforts of certain brilliant mathematicians of the last century, the theory
was expressed in exact mathematical form. But it had remained a purely
abstract theory, although, finally, like most abstract theories, it found
practical application - very recently, when super-long-distance military
weapons were developed.
After weighing all the information he now had about their planet, Maxim