"Murray Leinster - First Contact (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

teeth. Tommy Dort said meditatively:
“D’you know, sir, I saw something like this on a liner of the Earth—Mars run once, when we
were being located by another ship. Their locator beam was the same frequency as ours, and every
time it hit, it registered like something monstrous, and solid.”
“That,” said the skipper savagely, “is just what’s happening now. There’s something like a
locator beam on us. We’re getting that beam and our, own echo besides. But the other ship’s
invisible! Who is out here in an invisible ship with locator devices? Not men, certainly!”
He pressed the button in his sleeve communicator and snapped:
“Action stations! Man all weapons! Condition of extreme alert in all departments
immediately!”
His hands closed and unclosed. He stared again at the visiplate, which showed nothing but
a formless brightness.
“Not men?” Tommy Dort straightened sharply. “You mean—”
“How many solar systems in our galaxy?” demanded the skipper bitterly. “How many planets
fit for life? And how many kinds of life could there be? If this ship isn’t from Earth—and it
isn’t—it has a crew that isn’t human. And things that aren’t human but are up to the level of deep-
space travel in their civilization could mean anything!”
The skipper’s hands were actually shaking. He would not have talked so freely before a
member of his own crew, but Tommy Dort was of the observation staff. And even a skipper whose
duties include worrying may sometimes need desperately to unload his worries. Sometimes, too, it
helps to think aloud.
“Something like this has been talked about and speculated about for years,” he said
soffly. “Mathematically, it’s been an odds-on bet that somewhere in our galaxy there’d be another
race with, a civilization equal to or further advanced than ours. Nobody could ever guess where -
or when we’d meet them. But it looks like we’ve done it now!”
Tommy’s eyes were very bright.
“D’you suppose they’ll be friendly, sir?”
The skipper glanced at the distance indicator. The phantom object still made its insane,
nonexistent swoops toward and away from the Lianvabon. The secondary indication of an object at


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eighty thousand miles stirred ever so slightly.
“It’s moving,” he said curtly. “Heading for us. Just what we’d do if a strange spaceship
appeared in our hunting grounds! Friendly? Maybe! We’re going to try to contact them. We have to.
But I suspect this is the end of this expedition. Thank God for the blasters!”
The blasters are those beams of ravening destruction which take care of recalcitrant
meteorites in a spaceship’s course when the deflectors can’t handle them. They are not designed as
weapons, but they can serve as pretty good ones. They can go into action at five thousand miles,
and draw on the entire power output of a whole ship. With automatic aim and a traverse of five
degrees, a ship like the Lianvabon can come very close to blasting a hole through a small-sized
asteroid which gets in its way. But not on overdrive, of course.
Tommy Dort had approached the bow-quartering visiplate. Now he jerked his head around.
“Blasters, sir? What for?”
The skipper grimaced at the empty visiplate.
“Because we don’t know what they’re like and can’t take a chance! I know!” he added
bitterly. “We’re going to make contacts and try to find out all we can about them—especially where
they come from. I suppose we’ll try to make friends—but we haven’t much chance. We can’t trust