"Murray Leinster - Invaders of Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

The voice from space swore virulently. The operator said, "You're just touching our force
beam now. Hold fast. I'm going to have to kill your lateral velocity and you're so low you may
feel it."
The growling voice from the loudspeaker bellowed an order, away from the microphone.
The unseen ship, still far out of atmosphere, floated into the invisible, intangible force beam of
the landing grid. Dials and indicators in the control office, aground, showed that the landing
grid's power was flowing swiftly out to make a field of almost solid density as the original
beam was pierced by the ship still high up and deep in the black shadow of the planet
Formalhaut III.
The ship became fixed in the fields of force. The grid operator sat leisurely erect. The
process of landing a ship from this point on was almost automatic. He adjusted a turn knob and
watched for the results. They were, of course, that the grid's force fields tightened gradually.
The Theban - still invisible in the night - became anchored in the immaterial beam. Then the
operator touched the braking button and the hovering ship checked. It had almost had velocity
enough for an orbit. To bring it down and land it in one piece, it had to be slowed to the speed
of the planet's rotation at the latitude of the spaceport.
The buzzing from the loudspeaker grew violently louder. There were crashes. Loose objects
in the ship's control room slid and banged to the floor, drawn there by the ship's artificial
gravity field.
The grid operator snapped, "Are you crazy? Cut your drive !"
More crashes. Then the buzzing ceased. When a ship is grasped by a landing grid's fields, it
cuts its own drive and is drawn down to the spaceport by the grid. Landing grids were
invented, at first, because they had to be made if space travel were to become practical. It
required more fuel for a ship to climb up into space against gravity than to journey halfway
across the galaxy. It required as much more to land safely. So landing grids were devised,
using ground-supplied power to lift and land starships. That simple fact tripled the cargo they
could carry.
Then the grids were developed past that simple usefulness. It appeared that they could draw
power from the ionized upper layers of a planet's atmosphere. They could provide for most - or
all - of a planet's energy requirements. And then it became obvious that they were very useful
because when they brought a ship down they placed it neatly in position opposite the passenger
ramp or the warehouse where passengers or cargo should be landed or taken aboard.
"I think," said Horn, "that up there in that ship they're a little bit panicky. Considering the
noises their engines were making, they've reason to be. They've been waiting for the engines to
blow any second. It took nerve to turn them off. They might not turn on again."
The grid operator said disgustedly, "There's something wrong with them, calling for an
emergency landing and yelling they've got to have emergency repairs! They ordered me to get a
repair crew ready to get them back aloft again in hours. Try to get union mechanics out of bed
for a special job, just on a tramp skipper's say-so!"
Horn shook his head. "They won't get off in hours, maybe days. That's an old-style
Riccardo drive, and the noise means it's about to lie down and die. I didn't know any of those
old ships were still in service. I'd hate to guess how old it is."
He could have looked up the descending ship in the Spacecraft Register and found out all
about her, even including her present very dubious reputation. But he wasn't interested enough
to do so.
He'd stopped by the spaceport to ask if there were news about the liner Danae, en route to
Formalhaut now. He knew there could be no news, of course. The Danae was somewhere in
the ship lanes leading from Canna II to Formalhaut III. There was a girl on board the Danae.
She was on the way to this planet. When she arrived, she and Horn were to be married. So
Horn was jumpy and unreasonably worried, and hungry for news that simply couldn't be had.