The Greatest SF Classics of Stanley G. Weinbaum. Stanley G. Weinbaum
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Название: The Greatest SF Classics of Stanley G. Weinbaum
Автор: Stanley G. Weinbaum
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 9788027247912
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"I should think this world he conquered would worship him!" exclaimed Connor.
"Worship him!" cried the girl. "Too many hate him, in spite of all he has done, not only for this age, but for ages gone—since the Enlightenment. He—"
But Tom Connor was no longer listening. All his thoughts, his attention, his eyes that drank in her beauty, were on the girl. So lovely—and to have so much wisdom stored up in the brain beneath the sheen of that satiny– black cap that was her hair. There could only be one answer to that. She must be a goddess, come to life.
He ached to touch her, to touch only the hem of her gauzy garment, but that must not be. His heart pounded at the very nearness of her—but it was with a worship that could have thrown him prostrate at her feet.
"It's all like a dream, what you've told me," he said, his voice far– away, musing. "You're a dream."
The dancing light of mockery came back into her sea–green eyes.
"Shall we leave it a dream—this meeting of ours?" she asked softly. She laid one white hand lightly on his arm and he thrilled at the touch as though an electric current had shot through him—but not a painful annihilating one now. "Man of the Ancients," she said, "will you give me a promise?"
"Anything—anything!" Connor said eagerly.
"Then promise me you will say nothing, not even to the Weed girl who is called Evanie the Sorceress, about having seen me this morning. No slightest hint."
For a moment Connor hesitated. Would it be disloyalty to Evanie, in any way, to make that promise? He did not know. What he did know was that it fell in with his own ideas to keep this meeting a secret—like something sacred; something to hold as a memory deep within his own heart only.
"Promise?" she repeated, in that silvery–bell voice.
Connor nodded. "I promise," he said soberly. "But tell me, will I see you again? Will you—"
Suddenly the girl leaped lightly to her feet, startled, as she stood listening, like the faun she appeared to be. Her astonishing emerald eyes were wide, as she poised for flight. Dimly, the entranced Connor became aware of voices back in the woods. Men were probably coming to seek him, knowing how sick he had been.
"I must go!" the girl whispered quickly. "But Man of the Ancients, we shall meet again! That is my promise. Keep yours!"
And then, before he could speak, she had whirled like a butterfly in flight, and was speeding through the woods on noiseless feet. Connor caught one last glimpse of her fluttering white draperies against the brown and green of tree trunks and leaves, then she was gone.
He passed a hand slowly before his bewildered eyes. A dream! But she had promised they would meet again. When?
The Village
Days slipped imperceptibly by. Connor had almost regained his full strength. Time and again, whenever he could do so unobserved, he slipped away to the woods alone, but never again did he catch sight of the wood nymph who had so deeply fascinated him. Gradually he came to persuade himself that the whole incident had been a dream. Many things as strange had happened to him since his awakening. Only one thing gave it the semblance of reality—the knowledge he had gleaned from the inky–haired girl of mystery, a knowledge later confirmed when he began to enter the peaceful life of the village.
Aside from Evanie, however, he had but one other close friend. He had taken at once to Jan Orm, engineer and operator of the village of Ormon's single factory on the hill.
The factory was a perpetual surprise to Connor. The incredibly versatile machines made nearly everything except the heavier mechanisms used in the fields, and these, he learned, could have been made. That was not necessary since the completed machines could as easily be transported as the steel necessary to construct them.
The atomic power amazed Tom Connor. The motors burned only water, or rather the hydrogen in it, and the energy was the product of synthesis rather than disintegration. Four hydrogen atoms, with their weight of 1.008, combined into one helium atom, with a weight of 4; somewhere had disappeared the difference of .032, and this was the source of that abundant energy—matter being destroyed, weight transformed to energy.
There was a whole series of atomic furnaces, too. The release of energy was a process of one degree, like radium; once started, neither temperature nor pressure could speed or slow it in the least. But the hydrogen burned steadily into helium at the uniform rate of half its mass in three hundred days.
Jan Orm was proud of the plant.
"Neat, isn't it?" he asked Connor. "One of the type called Omnifac; makes anything. There's thousands of 'em about the country; practically make each town independent, self–sustaining. We don't need your ancient cumbersome railroad system to transport coal and ore."
"How about the metal you use?"
"Nor metal either," Jan said. "Just as there was a stone age, a bronze age, and an iron age, just as history calls your time the age of steel, we're in the aluminum age. And aluminum's everywhere; it's the base of all clays, almost eight per cent of the Earth's crust."
"I know it's there," grunted Connor. "It used to cost too much to get it out of clay."
"Well, power costs nothing now. Water's free." His face darkened moodily. "If we could only control the rate, but power comes out at always the same rate—a half period of three hundred days. If we could build rockets—like the Triangles of Urbs. The natural rate is just too slow to lift its own weight; the power from a pound of water comes out too gradually to raise a one–pound mass. The Urban know how to increase the rate, to make the water deliver half its energy in a hundred days —ten days."
"And if you could build rockets?"
"Then," said Jan, growing even moodier, "then we'd—" He paused abruptly. "We can detonate it," he said in a changed voice. "We can get all the energy it one terrific blast, but that's useless for a rocket."
"Why can't you use a firing chamber and explode say a gram of water at a time?" Connor asked. "A rapid series of little explosions should be just as effective as a continuous blast."
"My father tried that," Jan Or said grimly. "He's buried at the bend of the river."
Later, Connor asked Evanie why Ian was so anxious to develop atom–powered rockets. The girl turned suddenly serious eyes on him, but made no direct reply.
"The Immortals guard the secret of the Triangle," was all she said. "It's a military secret."
"But what could he do with a rocket?"
She shook her glistening hair.
"Nothing, perhaps."
"Evanie," he said soberly, "I don't like to feel that you won't trust me. I know from what you've said that you're somehow opposed to the government. Well, I'll help you, if I but I can't if you keep me in ignorance."
The girl was silent.
"And СКАЧАТЬ