"Chapter 03" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gordon Dickson - Forever Man)

CHAPTER
3




IN ThE SAME MOMENT, ThE OTHER SHIPS OP WANDER SECTION
were appearing around the ancient spaceship. Their magnetic
beams licked out and locked-and held-a fraction of a sec-
ond before La Chasse Gallerie bucked like a wild horse and
tried to escape with a surge at many gravities of acceleration.
Taken by surprise by a power kick that should have killed
any human aboard the long-lost vessel, the mass of the five
other ships still naanaged to hold her back.
"Hold-" Jim was whispering into the headpiece of his suit
and circuits were translating his old-fashioned phrases into
blinking signal lights beamed at the cone-shaped ship. "Hold,
La Chasse Gallerie. This is a Government Rescue Contingent,
title Wander Section. Do not resist. We are taking you in
tow-" The unfitness of the ancient word jarred in Jim's
mouth as he said it. "We're taking you in tow to return you to
your Base Headquarters. Repeat..."
The flashing lights went on spelling the message out, over
and over again. La Chasse Gallerie ceased fighting and hung
docilely in the net of magnetic forces. Jim got a talk beam
touching on the aged hull.
"...home," a voice was saying, the same voice he had
heard recorded in Mollen's office. "Chez ....." It broke
into a tangle of French that Jim could not follow, and emerged
in accented English with the cadence of poetry. .... . Poleon,
hees sojer never fight-more brave as dem poor habitants-
Chenier, he try for broke de rank~henier come dead imm~
diatement..."
"La Chasse Gallerie. La Chasse Gallerie," Jim was say
ing over and over, while the blinking lights on his hull trans-
formed the words into a ship's code over a century dead. "Can
you understand me? Repeat, can you understand me? If so,
acknowledge. Acknowledge .....
There was no response from the dust-scarred hull, slashed
by the Laagi weapons. Only the voice, reciting what Jim now
recognized as a poem by William Henry Drummond, one of
the early poets to write in the French-accented English of the
Canadian habitant in the nineteenth century.
"....De gun dey rattle lak' tonnere-" muttered on the
voice. "Just bang, bang, bang! Dat's way she go-" Abruptly
the voice of Raoul Penard shifted to poetry; in the pure French
of another poem by a medieval prisoner looking out the tower
window of his prison on the springtime, the shift was in per