"Campbell, John W Jr - The Mightiest Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

"She's charged, and ready to ride!" Aarn sighed. "To Jupiter we go-and I'm going to wind up some speed this time!"
The Sunbeam turned, and Jupiter rode into view, five hundred million miles away. To the left, Mars glowed dully red-green. Aarn pushed his controller over slowly. Farther and farther. Then slowly, infinitely slowly, Mars began to expand more and more quickly untjHt was ballooning swiftly, and with a sudden rush swept by them. They were lifting now, lifting in a great arc out of the planetary orbits, up and over the meteor-infested asteroid belt. Five-ten million miles. A needle on a dial before Aarn was quivering against its stop pin, the last reading, forty thousand, well behind it. The Sunbeam was going over fifty thousand miles a second.
"She's rolling!" Aarn grinned. Skillfully he looped gently back into the orbital plane, as he snapped his controller back to zero, reversed a tumbler, and pushed up again
39
for deceleration. "We haven't room in this puny little system for this baby-she needs free space to work right."
Aarn was right. The Sunbeam needed free space to work in.
Invisible, a dark, jagged mass of age-old broken planet, riding in one of those ultra-eccentric, unpredictable orbits, was far, far out of the asteroid belt. One hundred tons of solid, tough nickel-steel, the same sort of stuff men had been collecting for a century from space to make armor plate.
Aarn was right when he said the Sunbeam had the momentum of a major planet-concentrated. Traveling at about forty-two .thousand miles a second, slightly less than a quarter of the speed of light, the Sunbeam struck that hundred-thousand-ton mass of metal.
For the millionth part of a second, Aarn caught a glimpse of that jagged mass, suddenly illuminated by the light of the Sun-then the magnetic atmosphere struck it. Driven by the full-fed aggie coils, new charged from the fires of the Sun, the magnetic forces shrieked horribly and ripped the mass to incandescent gas in a hundred thousandth of a second. Then the individual molecules slipped unresisted through the forces-still-with a mass of a hundred thousand tons. The 'gravity field and the momentum waves struck it simultaneously.
Space itself shrieked under the impact. Torn by forces beyond even its endurance, space tore open-the Sunbeam, part of the now-gaseous meteor, and the contending forces simply dropped through to where neither force nor mass nor energy had meaning.
In the space liner Aldebaron Captain Arnold Barett wrote in his log book:
"At 13:45:30 o'clock, May 14, 2079, a terrific burst of
light appeared about ten million miles away, out of the plane of the orbits, and persisted for about five minutes, gradually dying away. It was a curious ring-shaped light, dark in the center for a moment, then suddenly bright as though with a violet sunlight shining through from beyond, then dark again.
"For some time, not even stars beyond this blackness showed, but gradually they reappeared. The duration of the blackness was accompanied by certain peculiar phenomena described by Chief Engineer Rand.
"Chief Mate Matterson reports definitely that he saw a new-type ship, believed to be the new experimental ship of the Spencer Co., moving toward the point where the phenomena appeared shortly before it happened. Matterson reports also, however, that he could see the ship moving against the background of the stars. The distance must have been over ten millions of miles, so he is probably mistaken. No ship could move visibly at that distance."
VI
A BLAST OF light that was almost physically painful struck Aarn Munro, and he moved restlessly, then jerked abruptly erect. He was facing the control window, and outside he could see six strange ships, each about two hundred feet long, needle-slim, with a tiny visible control-room port, and a ring of projections studding the nose. And the nose of each pointed toward the Sunbeam steadily; only occasionally did one swing and dart suddenly to a new position. Powerful beams of bluish light were sweeping over their ship as they apparently investigated.
"What happened?" asked Spencer tensely, suddenly coming up beside Aam.
"Struck a big meteor. Don't quite know what happened. Ever see ships like those?"
"No known and recognized shipyard of the system ever turned those out," snapped the designer.
"I didn't think so. Did you notice the stars beyond?"
Spencer looked puzzled at his friend, then out toward space beyond. But it wasn't, he suddenly realized, black space. It was silver. It flamed and glowed and sparkled like a curtain of the magnetic atmosphere. There were stars, great brilliant white-hot suns scattered so thickly that space could scarcely show through. The heat from those myriad suns was almost palpable even here.
"Where are we?"
"Don't know-only know where we aren't," replied Munro, his eyes darting swiftly over his instruments.
The ships outside were circling closer now. They had evidently decided the ship was totally dead.
"We aren't in the solar system. I-I've an idea. It seems rather fantastic-but it would explain it, perhaps. You have to admit we are at least one hundred thousand light-years away from where we started-farther really-because those suns I see out there would make the Milky Way a dim thing. The Milky Way flung across that bunch would show up as a dark ribbon-literally. Actually, we must be a million light-years away. Or more.
"That's a globular cluster, and it's about one hundred thousand light-years or more in diameter, at the minimum. I've spotted three supergiant, type-O stars. That's hot enough to melt the rivets out of a solar investigator at half a light-year. Those three can't be closer than one hundred thousand light-years.
"Those fellows outside are getting bolder. They'd come in but the magnetic atmosphere has them worried. I see it's still on. The momentum oscillations have broken down. A transpon beam lead gave way. The antigravity field has collapsed, and we're falling freely into the local sun. There is one, though we can't see it just now, and it must be a hot one. Look at the color of the light on those ships. It's violet-positively violet.
"They'll try to crack us soon. Take these controls. I'm going back." Aarn leaped. The artificial-gravity apparatus was still functioning, but an Earth gravity didn't bother Aam much. He met Carlisle on the way back. Carlisle was looking over the air apparatus, which seemed to have stopped functioning.
"Your transpon lead has failed," snapped Aarn as he passed, "I'm going to set it up in a few seconds."
Martin, Spencer's man, who had been brought along in his capacity of chief cook and bottle washer, was just com-
ing out of his galley, his head in his hands. The acceleration neutralization was not quite perfect down so far from the center of the ship, and when they struck the meteor, he had been somewhat shaken up.
"Martin-come along. And call Bob."
Bob was the assistant electronics engineer whom Spencer had brought along. Bob was actually Dr. Robert Canning, and besides being an electronics engineer, he was a clever and skilled mechanician.
Aarn was in the control room. In fifteen seconds he had found the defective lead, cut it out with a pair of bolt clippers, and was disconnecting the studs when Canning showed up •witti Martin.
"Hey, lazy, get a new number twenty-seven lead. Martin, you get the liquid copper, will you?"
"Sorry-didn't come to right off. Saw the planetoid just before we hit, and passed out. What's the matter?"
Canning was back with the bus bar and snapped it in place. Aarn ran down the studs and painted it with the electro-copper solutions Martin brought, solutions which would make the copper surfaces knit electrically, but not too firmly, physically.
" "Plenty-we aren't in the solar system-strange ships-looks like attack."
Aarn was busy with the sun beam controls. He was thinking rapidly, and changing settings slowly, he examined the aggie-coil charges, and found that the banks were still about one third charged. He tested the connecting transpon beams to the momentum apparatus. Something more delicate had given away, also, for there was no response whatsoever.
"Nuisance-isn't it?" said Aarn.
He dived across the ship as though there had been no artificial gravity, then leaped halfway to the control room
and took over the controls again with less than two minutes' absence.
"They've been sticking instruments into our field," said Spencer, moving out of Aarn's way. "They probably detected our actions when you changed the aggie-coil power distribution. What's up?"
"Wanted current. No great voltage," replied Aarn. "The momentum apparatus is dead, and Canning's working over it."
"The air's working again," said Carlisle, entering. "I've been looking at the stars. Where are we?"
"Too far away to say. I think, though, and hope, that we are in another four-dimensional space. We've gone from our universe to another one through perhaps a five-dimensional nothingness. Like going from one three-dimensional world to another three-dimensional world through a four-dimensional nothingness.
"That's a high-explosive torpedo of some sort he's sending over. I noticed they stripped the hide off of it."
A long, slim device, perhaps a foot in diameter, and twenty feet long had started out of one of the projections on one of the ships. "High explosive-or I'm a chemist instead of a physicist."
• The torpedo drifted swiftly, under air pressure evidently, for about a hundred yards, then abruptly the tail became wreathed in smoke, and the thing hurled itself forward violently. It darted at the Sunbeam-and suddenly exploded halfway.