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

could be computed with precision. And the buoy stayed close to it. Ships seeking the former liner,
now a freight station and hotel, could know exactly where to find it in the three-hundred-million-mile
orbit the checkpoint followed. The buoy would, quite simply, be where computation
placed the marker. And that was known and printed for every imaginable month, day, and hour far
into the future.
It loomed large as the magnification on the screen increased. A twinkling speck appeared beside it.
Scott stared and shook his head. The Five Comets on the way, and the buoy not moved to safety?
Even criminals . . . But then his lips tensed. Things looked worse than he'd supposed.
The buoy was — had been — a ship not unlike the one Scott was on. Now it sprouted radio and radar
and telemetering equipment seemingly by the hundreds of pieces. By the size of the ship, Scott could
now guess distances. The glittering marker-asteroid was about two miles from the buoy. They floated
in the same orbit, very near each other. More magnified now, peculiar ringed depressions appeared in
the' substance of the marker. They were craters, like those found on the inner moons and Mars and
Mercury in the First System. They were impact-craters from bombardment of the asteroid by rocky
masses hurtling through the sky. They were evidence that space wasn't always empty where the
checkpoint floated. Two robot checkpoints had vanished from their orbits here, and astronomers
blamed the Five Comets and pointed to the impact-craters as proof that they were the cause.
Scott turned his head. There were the vaguely circular patches of brightness against the stars. They
were the Comets, on schedule. Their orbits were commensurable, and every so often they reached
aphelion all together. This was such an occasion. It had been known for a long time, but the buoy was
ignoring it. It floated obliviously in space, some tens of times its own length from its marker-
asterioid.
"I'll go down to the air-lock," said Scott. "Keep your man on the overdrive button. After I'm aboard,
wait nearby until I release you or at least until half an
hour has passed. And —" he passed over his written report —" see that this gets to a Patrol office as
soon as possible.
He went down to the air-lock. Liner crewmen waited to let him out. Merchant ships carried many
more men than did comparable Patrol ships. They operated more elaborately. Quite unnecessarily
now, they checked the tuning of his suit to communicator-frequency to make sure he'd overhear all
talk between the liner and Lambda, and that he could take part in it.
For a long, long time there was nothing. He heard small sounds from someplace where a microphone
was open. Then a voice in his helmet-phones said ungraciously, "We'll receive Lieutenant Scott. Put
him in a space suit. We'll send over a tentacle for him."
The liner skipper's voice came through the same headohones in Scott's helmet.
"He's on his way to the air-lock."
Scott watched the small monitor screen in the airlock wall. Its function was to show the immediate
outside of the lock, to facilitate emergency operations of any kind. At first Scott could only see a
shining field of stars. Then slowly the glittering metal object which was the space buoy seemed to
creep past the edge of the screen and into plain view. Its steel hull was coated with that golden plating
which old-style overdrive fields required of ships they transported. There were ports along the fish-
shaped flanks. There were cargo doors. There were lesser doors which would be personnel air-locks.
And there were jungles of antennae for communication and meteor-watch and telemetry at different
spots.
Scott's eyes fixed themselves on an open air-lock door. It could be nothing deadlier than a door
already opened for him to enter. But a short-range rocket could issue from it, if any had been shipped
to the buoy as freight.
The star-field moved. The liner was shifting position. It changed its angle to the buoy until, if there
were a missile in that open lock, it would no longer bear on the liner. It implied an informed
uneasiness on the part of the liner's skipper. Scott took time out to approve of him.
"Here comes our tentacle," said the grating voice.