"Edmond Hamilton - Captain Future 18 - Red Sun of Danger" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

Carlin's mind as a soundless magnetic elevator
bore him upward.
"Vitron has seen to that!"
Vitron! The whole Solar System depended on
the magic drug these days, as much as on the
air it breathed--the drug of long life!
For vitron was a super-vitamin, a chemical
agent that combated the poisons which cause
the human body to age. It would give people a
century of life, and decades of useful youth. It
had at one stroke enormously expanded man's
prospective life-span.
But nine-tenths of the precious vitron came
from a world far outside the System. Now that
supply was threatened!
If the System learned of that danger, there
would be a panic. But Daniel Crewe, the
System President, had imparted it only to the
scientists who had discovered vitron and to the
others whom he had summoned to this urgent
conference tonight.
CARLIN was thinking of those others now,
without hope. "What can they do, if the
Government is powerless? What can any of us
do?"
When he entered the tower-top room that was
the President's office he found that Zamok, the
solemn Martian biochemist, and Lin Sao, the
plump Venusian cytologist, were already there.
So was Commander Halk Anders of the Planet
Patrol, a hard-faced, massive man in gray
uniform.
But the room was somehow dominated by the
fourth man, the worn, colorless little Earthman
upon whose shoulders rested the vast weight of
administering the government of the System's
worlds and moons. Daniel Crewe looked as
though that weight were crushing him, tonight.
"They're not here yet?" Philip Carlin asked
hesitantly.
"They're coming now," Commander Anders
said curtly. "Hear that?"
A low, muffled drone was audible from the
night sky somewhere above this tower-top
room. To Carlin, who was no spaceman, it was
indistinguishable from the sound of any other
rocket-ship. But Anders was sure.
"That's Captain Future's ship," he said.
Crewe's tired eyes lighted a little. "I was sure
they would come quickly."