"Frankowski,.Leo.-.Conrad.Starguard.4.-.Flying.Warlord" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

The body within was shriveled and dried. It was laying on its side, a
look of horror on its face. Its fingernails were all ripped off as if the
man had tried to claw his way out before his air was exhausted.

"His stasis field must have failed," he said.

"But that's impossible! You know that's impossible! The circuitry for
the stasis field is always built inside the field itself Time doesn't
exist inside the field, so how could the circuitry possibly have had
time to fail?"

"Yeah, I know. But I still say that something is screwed up
somewhere. The trip here takes six years subjective, and he had
maybe two hours of air in the can. But that's not the big question.
The biggie is whether or not you want to take the trip back. Me, I
wouldn't risk it. "

"Well, this chamber that I'm in hasn't failed. Why should it fail just
because the other one did?"

"You know better than that, bitch. You're in the same damn
chamber he's in. Right after sending you back, I got to send the
empty chamber back to yesterday. It makes for a quicker
turnaround that way. But I ran a self-check on it last night and it
checked out perfect. So make up your mind. You're costing the
owner a million bucks a second."

"Screw the owner," she said, squirming out of the chamber. "I'm
not going anywhere till I see a live body crawl out of this thing!"

"Then help me get this dead one into your chamber. We gotta let
the people uptime know what the problem is and we don't have
much time to do it. Getting the body should be explanation
enough!"

"Why not just ship him in the one he came in?"

He got the surprisingly light corpse into the other canister. "Lady,
your big problem is that you're dumb."

He sent the canister back uptime and waited for a reply.

He waited for a long, long time.

Chapter One

FROM THE DIARY OF TADAOS KOLPINSKI

My people was always boatmen on the Vistula. My father was a
boatman and his father before him, and my great-grandfather was