"Murray Leinster - Checkpoint Lambda" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

COPYRIGHT© 1966, BY MURRAY LEINSTER
Published by arrangement with the author BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, JULY, 1966
BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by
Berkley Publishing Corporation
15 East 26th Street, New York, N.Y. 10010
Berkley Medallion Books® TM 757,375
Printed in the United States of America
CHAPTER 1
Scott ran into the situation on a supposedly almost-routine tour of duty on Checkpoint Lambda. It
was to be his first actual independent command as a 'Space Patrol commissioned officer.
Otherwise the affairs of the galaxy seemed to be proceeding in a completely ordinary fashion. On
a large scale, suns burned in emptiness, novas flamed, and comets went bumbling around their
highly elliptical orbits just as usual. On a lesser scale, where the affairs of men were concerned,
there seemed to be no deviation from the customary. The Golconda Ship had vanished, to be sure,
but it was the habit of that fabulous vessel to disappear once in every four years, while half the
galaxy tried to guess where it had gone, and the rest tried to think of ways to intercept it when it
came back.
Other human activities were commonplace. Huge bulk-cargo carriers lifted off from spaceports
and moved slowly out to emptiness. At appropriate distances the landing grids which had lifted
them let go, and the ungainly objects flickered and abruptly disappeared. Actually, they were on
their way to destinations light-centuries distant, wrapped in cocoons of overdrive-field which
carried them many times faster than light. Sleek, bright metal ships, graceful in outline, shot into
being from nothingness and then swam slowly to the point where the same landing grids' force-
fields could lock on and let them^ down to worlds totally new. Mile-long ships with swimming
pools and hundreds of deck-levels carried cargo and passengers between star clusters, and small,
grubby cargo craft ferried minerals from airless satellites to the planets they circled. Space-yachts
cruised leisure-
ly, while battered tramp ships doggedly nosed into queer corners of space upon their sometimes
legitimate business.
The galaxy was .a very busy place. There was most activity, perhaps, near the yellow sun on whose
third planet humanity had begun and from which it had spread to distances incomprehensibly
immense. But it was busy everywhere.
A space lane stretched from Rigel to Taret, two thousand light-years from one end to the other,
colonized worlds clustered upon it like beads upon, a string. Space lanes led to the Coalsack and from
the Rim to Betelgeuse. Other surveyed lanes forked, then joined, ended, and began once more.
Sometimes they crossed each other. At intervals there were spaceports for the exchange of passengers
and freight between ship lanes. Men displayed great ingenuity in arranging such things.
There was the sun Canis Lambda, for example. Scott was on his way to take command of the
checkpoint that floated in orbit around it. Canis Lambda was a yellow type G sun which should have
had as many planets as ancient Sol. At some unimaginably remote period it had possessed them. But
like Sol, which possessed an unnamed world that blew itself to bits — bits now floating aimlessly
between Mars and Jupiter — Canis Lambda had four now-detonated children, reduced these days
from mountains and islands to particles of celestial sand. None was large enough to be called a planet
and all seemed useless. Yet the sun Canis Lambda burned brightly in emptiness where no less than
six man-marked space lanes crossed each other. And men needed a course-marker, a buoy, a transfer-
point there. So they built one.
The first two attempts were failures, because they were only buoys. They vanished, and the Five
Comets of Canis Lambda were blamed for their disappearance. The current checkpoint was more
ambitious.
Men took an ancient ship that was unsuited for any other use. They drove it to Canis Lambda, took