Kratochvil Stanisław Psychoterapia Kierunki metody b
K. J. Yeskov Ostatni Wladca Pierscienia (3)
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Edgar Wallace Clue of the Twisted Candle
Witkiewicz Stanislaw Ignacy Narkotyki niemyte dusze
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.You're not anxious to tell me things.You don't volunteer information.Still, you draw the line at misinforming me."Boranova said, "I am a human being and I tell lies on occasion out of necessity or out of defects in my emotions or personality.But I am also a scientist and I would not twist scientific fact for any but the most compelling reasons.""Then what it amounts to is this.Even this ship, although it is much more massive than a helium nucleus, has a half-life.""A very long one," put in Boranova quickly."But the fact that we are so intensely miniaturized has curtailed this very long half-life.""Still leaving it long.""And what about the individual components of the ship? The molecules of water that we drink, the molecules of air we breathe, the individual atoms that make up our body? They could have -- must have -- very short --""No!" said Boranova forcefully, seeming to find relief in being able to deny something."The miniaturization field overlaps where it deals with particles sufficiently close together, and that are at rest, or nearly at rest, relative to each other.An extended body -- such as the ship and everything it contains -- is treated as a large but single particle and has a half-life of deminiaturization to match.There miniaturization differs from radioactivity.""Ah," said Morrison, "but when I was out of the ship and out of contact with it, could it be that I was then a separate particle with a much smaller mass than the ship and its contents and that I had a miniaturization half-life much smaller than we have now?""I'm not sure," said Boranova, "whether the distance between yourself and the ship was great enough to make you a separate body.Possibly it did, for the time you were not in contact.""And I then had a shorter half-life -- much shorter.""Possibly -- but then you were out of contact only a matter of minutes.""Well, then, what is the half-life of this ship at the present level of miniaturization?""We can't really speak of the half-life of a single object.""Yes, because half-lives are statistical.For any particle, deminiaturization can come, spontaneously, at any time, even after a very short time and even though the half-life of a large number of similar particles would be quite long.""For spontaneous deminiaturization to come after a very short time when the statistical half-life is long is extremely improbable.""But not impossible, is it?""No," said Boranova."It is not impossible.""So we can suddenly deminiaturize in five minutes, or even in one minute, or even as I take my next breath.""In theory.""Did you all know?" His eyes darted around the ship."Of course you all knew.Why was I not told?"Boranova said, "We are volunteers, Albert, working for science and for our nation.We know all the dangers and accept them.You have been forced into this and you don't have the motives that drive us.It seemed possible that if you knew all the dangers, you would have refused to enter the ship voluntarily under any persuasion or that, being brought on board ship by force, you would be altogether useless to us out of sheer --" She paused."Out of sheer fright, you were going to say," said Morrison."Surely I have a right to be afraid.There is reason for fear."Kaliinin interrupted, her voice a little shrill."It is time to stop harping on Albert's fear, Natalya.It is he who left the ship in an inadequate suit.It is he who turned the ship around at the risk of his life.Where was his fear then? If he felt it, he bottled it inside and didn't let it prevent him from doing what had to be done."Dezhnev said, "And yet it was you who did not hesitate to say, in the past, that Americans were all cowardly.""Then I was wrong.I was speaking unfairly and I ask Albert's pardon."It was at this point that Morrison caught Konev's eye.The man was twisting around in his seat and glowering at him.Morrison did not pretend to be a master at reading facial expressions, but felt that he could, at a glance, tell what was ailing Konev.The man was jealous -- furiously and quite impressively jealous.48.The ship continued its slow way along the capillary toward the destination Konev had marked out: the skeptic node.It was not depending on the current now, which was slow indeed.The engines were going, as Morrison could tell, in two different ways.First, it steadied the ship to have it move along actively, rather than drift passively, and it further deadened the already surprisingly small effect of Brownian motion.Second, the ship was overtaking one red corpuscle after another.In most cases these were nudged to one side and the red corpuscles then rolled backward between the ship and the wall.Occasionally, a red corpuscle would be met too near dead-center and it would then be pushed forward for a while until it burst.The debris would flow backward, leaving the ship's hull unmarked.With at least five million corpuscles in every cubic millimeter of blood, it didn't matter how many were disrupted and Morrison had become hardened to the carnage.Morrison deliberately thought of the red cells, rather than of the chance of spontaneous deminiaturization.He knew there was no appreciable chance of exploding outward in the next few moments and, even if it happened, it would simply mean blackout.Death by fried brain would take place so quickly that there would be no conceivable way of sensing it.Not long before, he had been heating much more slowly in the bloodstream itself.He had felt himself dying.After that, instantaneous death had no terrors.But he preferred to think of other things just the same.Konev's look! What was seething within him and tearing him apart? He had abandoned Sophia with the utmost cruelty [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
