Страница 61 из 189
Sherkaner didn't answer immediately. U
The only light was the green and near-red that filtered through the ferns. That was more than enough to read the titles on the nearest books. There were psychology, math, electronics, an occasional astronomy text—and lots of children's storybooks. The books were stacked in low piles, filling most of the space between toys and equipment. And it wasn't always clear which were Underhill's toys and which were the children's. Some of the stuff looked like travel souvenirs, perhaps from Victory's military postings: a Tiefer leg polisher, dried flowers that might have been an Islander garland. And over in the corner...it looked like a Mark 7 artillery rocket, for God's sake. The warhead hatch had been removed, and there was a dollhouse installed in place of the customary high explosives.
Finally Underhill said, "You're right, money alone won't make progress. It takes time to make the machines that make the machines, and so on. But we still have another twenty-five years or so, and the General tells me you are a genius at managing something this large."
Hrunkner felt an old pride in hearing that, more pride than for all the medals he had collected in the Great War; but if it hadn't been for Smith and Underhill, he never would have discovered he had such talents. He replied grumpily, careful not to give away how much such praise meant to him: "Thank you so much. But what I'm telling you is that none of that is enough. If you want this done in less than twenty years, I need something more."
"Yes, what?"
"You, damn it! Your insight! Since the first year of the project, you've been hidden away up here in Princeton, doing God knows what."
"Oh....Look Hrunkner, I'm sorry. The atomic power stuff just isn't very interesting to me anymore."
Knowing Underhill for all these years, U
"Yes," continued Underhill, "you need more bright people. I'm working on that, you know; I have some things I want to show you. But even so," he said, obliviously pouring fuel on the fire, "my intuition is that atomic power will turn out to be relatively easy, compared to the other challenges."
"Such. As. What?"
Sherkaner laughed. "Such as raising children, for example." He pointed at the antique pendulum clock on the side wall. "I thought the other cobblies would be here by now; maybe I should show you the institute first." He got off his perch, began waving in that silly way parents do to small children. "Come down, come down. Rhapsa, stay off the clock!" Too late: the baby had scuttled off the gym, made a flying leap onto the pendulum, and slid all the way to the floor. "I've got so much junk here, I'm afraid something will fall on the babies and squash them." The two ran across the floor, hopped into their appointed places in their father's fur. They were scarcely bigger than woodsfairies.
Underhill had gotten his institute declared a division of Kingschool. The hillhouse contained a number of classrooms, each occupying an arc of the outside perimeter. And it wasn't Crown funds that paid for most of it, at least according to Underhill. Much of the research was simply proprietary, paid for by companies that had been very impressed by Underhill. "I could have hired away some of Kingschool's best, but we made a deal. Their people continue to teach and do research downtown, but they get time up here, with a percentage of our overhead getting fed back to Kingschool. And up here, what counts is results."
"No classes?"
When Sherkaner shrugged, the two little ones bobbed up and down on his back and made excited littlemeeping, sounds that probably meant, "Do it again, Daddy!"
"Yes, we have classes...sort of. The main thing is, people get to talk to other people, across many specialties. Students take a risk because things are so unstructured. I've got a few who are having a good time, but who aren't bright enough for this to work for them."
Most of the classrooms had two or three persons at the blackboards, and a crowd watching from low perches. It was hard to tell who was the prof and who the student. In some cases, Hrunkner couldn't even guess the field being discussed. They stopped for a moment by one door. A current-generation cobblie was lecturing a bunch of old cobbers. The blackboard scratching looked like a combination of celestial mechanics and electromagnetics. Sherkaner stopped, waved a smile at the people in the room. "You remember the aurora we saw in Dark? I have a fellow here who thinks that maybe it was caused by objects in space, things that are exceptionally dark."
"They weren't dark when we saw them."
"Yes! Maybe they actually have something to do with the start of the New Sun. I have my doubts. Jaybert doesn't know much celestial mechanics yet. Hedoes know E&M. He's working on a wireless device that can radiate at wavelengths of just a few inches."
"Huh? That sounds more like super far-red than radio."
"It's not something we could ever see, but it's going to be neat. He wants to use it as an echo finder for his space rocks."
They walked farther down the hall. He noticed that Underhill was suddenly silent, no doubt to give him time to think on the idea. Hrunkner U
His interest must have shown; Underhill was smiling more and more. "Yes, and that's Jaybert's real work of genius, something he calls a cavity oscillator. I've got a little ante
Even if Jaybert's stargazing never works out.Sherkaner Underhill was as crazy as ever, and U
"It's going to find them, anyway—and I think we're bringing out the best in what we find. I've never had more fun in my life. But you have to be flexible, Hrunk. The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don't always get what you thought you were asking for. From this era on, I think invention will be the parent of necessity—and not the other way around."