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

pens. Today, though, we have a passenger to transfer by tenacle to the buoy Lambda. It will be
interesting ! to watch. This checkpoint buoy was formerly a crack [ interstellar liner. In its day —" \
Scott moved tiff to the control room as the brisk voice described the former liner now floating as
a hulk in emptiness. It was still equipped with the solar system drive-engines which could shift its
position about the local sun, but they could not conceivably drive it to any other solar system.
Here it was, and here it must remain, depending on passing ships for its contacts with the rest of
the galaxy. The voice mentioned antennas and radar-mirrors and telemetering equipment as if
they were strange. It pictured the transfer of a passenger by space tentacle as an operation of vast
interest. Scott reached the control room and heard a mate off to one side completing the
saccharine speech into a microphone. The skipper nodded a greeting. He looked uneasy. Every,
skipper worried about breakout. There was no authenticated record of a ship breaking out to
collide immediately with a planet or asteroid or a sun's blazing photosphere, but a ship did come
back to normal space almost at random.
A voice from overhead in the control room said with careful distinctness, "When the gong
sounds, breakout will be exactly in five seconds."
There was a slow, monotonous tick-tock-tick-tock. It lasted an interminable time. Then a
recorded gong sounded, and the same carefully distinct voice said, "Five-four-three-two-one — "
The vision-screens flickered. Everybody on the liner felt a ghastly dizziness, and the sensations
of a spinning, spiral fall. Then there was nausea, quick and sharp and revolting, but mercifully it
lasted only a heartbeat.
Then the screens blazed with light. A thousand million specks of brightness glittered upon the
formerly
rust-red screens. A tinny voice said, "Checkpoint Lambda. Checkpoint Lambda. Report. Report,"
and a tiny whining sound began to come from the liner's automatically taped log which was now
broadcasting in a high-speed transmission for the checkpoint to record. The Milky Way sprawled
across no less than four vision-screens, and the distorted black nebula, the Coalsack, loomed
large and near. It was of another shape than when seen from Earth. To the left, and ahead, a
bright yellow sun with a barely perceptible disk shone luridly. There were peculiar luminosities
close by. They would be the Five Comets of Canis Lambda; matters of interest to professional
astronomers but not usually to anybody else. Scott, though, regarded them with a frown. The
liner's skipper shook his head.
"Good that we broke out short," he observed. "I'd hate to come out of overdrive close to them!"
Scott said nothing. All overdrive runs were timed to stop short of their destination, with shorter
jumps to closer approximation. The odds against collisions on breakout were enormous, and
research expeditions had actually penetrated the hearts of those clumped meteoric hordes which
were cometary heads and nuclei. But that was a hair-raising trick, and possible only by the most
tedious and painstaking matching of velocities. One definitely wouldn't want to break out inside a
comet. And meteor-streams trailed most of them. The Five Comets of Canis Lambda were
particularly undesirable close neighbors for space craft. Two robot checkpoints in succession had
vanished from orbit around this sun. Still, most ships merely reported their passage there and
went on to the infinite emptiness beyond.
"Umph," said the skipper. "We'll go on in."
The operation of approaching a landing was much more complicated on a liner than on a Patrol
ship. There was verification of the ecliptic plane. There was
careful measurement of distance. Micrometric adjustment of the short-jump relay. A man couldn't
time an overdrive jump to Jess than the fiftieth of a second. A properly timed relay could split a fifty-
thousandth. The figures were checked, and checked again, and the settings made and verified. All the
while the ceiling speaker continued to repeat metallically, "Checkpoint Lambda. Checkpoint Lambda.
Report. Report." The call had been traveling at the speed of light for almost an hour before the liiier
picked it up from the yet unseen and unseeable space buoy. The liner's automatic reply was now