"Gordon Dickson & Harry Harrision - Lifeship Lp Ebook Txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

He punched the "open" button. The inner lock door swung wide. Dim figures were stumbling toward him in the smoke. Giles swore. They were all human, dressed alike in the dusty gray of their arbite shipsuits. There were five of them, he counted as they came closer, clinging to one another's clothing, several of them whimpering when they were not coughing. The one in front was an angular, gray-haired woman who dipped her head briefly in an automatic gesture of respect when she saw him. He opened the inner door and motioned them inside, moving aside so they would not brush against him as they went. Before the last one was in, the

corridor lights flickered, went out, came back on again—then died completely.

Giles closed the door behind the five and touched the glow button on his watch. Under normal conditions the light from the dial was normally quite strong, but now it only lit up the rolling smoke, let in from the corridor. The air holding the smoke was hotter too; the fire could not be far away. He was coughing again, and could not control it, his head aching from the fumes.

With a sharp clang a section of the airlock wall fell away and Giles turned in that direction. The air current from a hidden source was suddenly stronger, and there was an elongated opening in what had appeared to be solid metal. The smoke was being sucked into it strongly. In the partially clear air a tall, thin form appeared, stooping with its head to pass through the opening.

"About timel" Giles said, coughing. The Albenareth did not answer him, moving quickly in a typical broken-kneed gait to the lock, with Giles close behind. Once they were both inside, the Albenareth turned and dogged shut the inner lock door. The action spoke for itself; the clash of the dogged lock echoed on Giles' ears like the closing of a coffin lid.

The voices of the arbites had dropped into silence as the Albenareth and Giles entered, and those already there moved warily aside from the alien. Still silent, the gaunt figure reached down into a slot in the soft flooring and pulled up a metal frame laced with flexible plastic. It was an acceleration cot, and a good deal of dust came up with it.

"Open the cots like this," the Albenareth ordered, the human words coming out at last, high-pitched and buzzing. "Strap down. Motions will be abrupt."

In the continuing silence, he turned and strode to the control console in the lifeship's nose, and belted himself into one of the two control chairs there. His three-fingered hands moved swiftly. Lights glowed on the panels and the two viewscreens before him came to life, showing only the out-of-focus metal walls of the lifeship capsule. Giles and the arbites aboard had just enough time to pull up their cots before the launch button was hit. They

clutched at the frames of their cots as the sudden acceleration pounced on them.

Explosive charges blew away the hull section covering the lifeship capsule. Gravity forces pressed them hard against the webbing of their cots, as the lifeship was hurled away from its mother ship, into space. The acceleration changed direction as the lifeship's drive took over and moved it away from the dying ship; and a nauseating sensation rippled through their bodies as they left the gravity field of the larger vessel and the weaker grav-simulation field of the lifeship came on.

Giles was aware of all this only absently. Automatically his hands were locked tightly about the metal frame of his cot to keep him from being thrown off it, but his eyes were fixed on the right of the two viewscreens in the bow. The screen on the left showed only stars, but the right-hand screen gave a view directly astern, a view filled with the image of the burning, dying ship.

There was no relation between the jumble of wreckage seen there and the ship they had boarded in orbit high above the equator of Earth, twelve days before. Twisted and torn metal glowed white-hot in the darkness of space. Some lights still showed in sections of the hull, but most of it was dark. The glowing wreckage had shrunk to the size of a hot ember as they hurtled away from it;

now it maintained a constant size and moved from screen to screen as they orbited about it. The Albenareth that had joined them was speaking into a grille below one of the screens, in the throbbing buzz of his own tongue. He or she was pronouncing what were clearly the same words, over and over again, until there was a scratching hiss from the speaker and another voice answered. There was a rapid discussion as the burning wreck was centered on the forward screen, then began to grow in size once more.

"We're going back!" an arbite voice shouted hysterically from the darkness. "Stop him! We're going back!"

"Be quietl" Giles said, automatically. "All of you—that's an order!" After a second, he added, "The Albenareth knows what has to be done. No one else can pilot this ship."

In silence the arbites continued to watch as the image of the

wreckage grew before them, enlarging until it filled the screen— until it appeared they were driving down into it. But the smooth play of the Albenareth's six long fingers on the control console keys controlled the lifeship's motion, sent it drifting inward, slipping past jagged fangs of steel that swam into view in the lifeship's forward viewscreen. Suddenly, there was a smooth, unscarred section of hull before them and they clanged against it. Magnetic clamps thudded as they locked on, and the lifeship was moved spasmodically, with loud grating sounds, as it was orientated with something on the hull. Then the alien rose from the controls, turned, and strode back to undog the airlock. The inner door ground open—then the outer one.

There was no rush of air, for they were sealed tight to another airlock—one on the spaceliner. The outer door of this lock, chilled from space and white-frosted with condensation, opened a crack, then stopped. The Albenareth wrapped a fold of his smocklike garment around his hands, seized the open edge, and pulled strongly until it opened all the way. Smoke haze beyond it cleared briefly to reveal another airlock and the gaunt figures of two more Albenareth.

There was a rapid conversation between the three aliens. Giles could make out no expression on the creased and wrinkled dark skin of their faces. Their eyes were round and unreadable. They punctuated their words with snapping gestures of their threefingered hands, opening and closing the mutually opposed fingers. Suddenly, their talk ceased. Both the first Albenareth and one of the others reached out to touch the fingertips of both their hands, briefly, with those of the third, who stood deepest within the lock.

The two closer aliens stepped back into the lifeship. The one they left did not move or try to follow them. Then, as the airlock door began to close, all three began to laugh at once, together, in their high-pitched, clattering laughter, until the closing door separated them. Even then, the captain and the alien beside him continued to laugh as the lifeship moved away from their shipmate in the spaceliner wreckage. Only slowly did their laughter die, surrounded by the staring silence of the arbite passengers. Shock at the sudden disaster fatigue, and smoke inhalation, or perhaps all these things, combined to numb the watching humans as they stared with reddened eyes at the image of the burning ship, pictured on the stemview screen in the front of the lifeship. The image dwindled, until it was no more than a star among all the other points of light on the screen.

Finally, it winked from sight. When it was gone, the tall alien who had first entered the lifeship and driven it outward from the spaceliner rose from the control seat, turned, and came back to face the humans, leaving the other alien doing some incomprehensible work with part of the control panel. The first Albenareth halted an arm's length from Giles, and raised one long, dark finger, the middle of the three on his hand.

"I am Captain Rayumung." The finger moved around to point back at the second alien. "Engineer Munghanf."

Giles nodded in acknowledgment.

"You are their leader?" demanded the Captain.

*T am an Adelman," said Giles, frigidly. Even allowing for the natural ignorance of the alien, it was hard to endure an assumption that he might be merely one of a group of arbites.