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

It was as if the noise had almost stopped. But it didn't. It caught and went on again. And then
Horn was abruptly and totally awake. He had a body, and cold chills ran down the spine of it.
He knew what had happened to him. Part of it he remembered, but the rest he could guess with
no trace of uncertainty.
He was in absolute darkness, with the buzzing moan of a failing Riccardo space drive in his
ears. He lay upon bales and boxes very indifferently arranged. Something sharp prodded the
middle of his back. It would be the corner of a box. There were smells in the air. They were
absolutely distinctive. There was the smell of grease and dirt and metal and paint, of shipping
cases and wrappings, of things gone putrid and now dried to the point where they were nearly
but not quite odourless. And the air had a dead smell. It was tanned air.
The remains of pins-and-needles pricklings were fading away in his legs and arms. He
heard, again, the noise whose interruption had wakened him. It was an obsolete space-drive
engine in the process of wearing out.
This was the cargo hold of a spaceship. Nowhere else in all the galaxy would there be such
abysmal blackness and such a mixture of odours with dead, uncirculated, unfreshened air. He
was struggling to rise from among cargo parcels dumped anyhow in the hold. He had been laid
on them after being knocked out with a stun pistol in the spaceport gatehouse. The guards there
had been either unconscious or dead. He did not remember being brought here, but he knew
he'd been abducted, and he knew by what men from what ship. He also knew the ship was in
space, with its drive in a condition to make any man's flesh crawl.
No, he hadn't been abducted. He'd been shanghaied. A man has been shanghaied when he's
been kidnapped to be made to work, against his will and at tasks he does not choose. He'd been
shanghaied to patch the probably unpatchable engines of the space tramp Theban.
And the Theban was in space. It wasn't conceivable that the grid had lifted it off, so the
tramp had taken off on emergency lift - possible only to Riccardo engines in spacecraft larger
than a spaceboat - and now was somewhere beyond the Formalhaut solar system. The chances
of a blown drive had been great. The skipper of the Theban had risked destruction to get off the
ground with such engines.
Horn was in a very nasty fix. His captors had broken a whole group of laws; they couldn't
put him ashore without exposing themselves to drastic prison terms. In fact, since it was known
that the Theban had done what had been done, the ship itself couldn't land anywhere that the
news of its irregular behaviour had reached. The patrol was very, very strict about such
matters. And besides all that, the ship's engines were in an appalling state. If they blew past
cobbling, Horn would die with his abductors when the air gave out.
And Ginny was on the way to Formalhaut to marry him. She'd arrive and find him gone.
He got up, and was dizzy for moments. But then the last prickling traces of the stun pistol's
effect went away and he ground his teeth in the blackness. He began to crawl over the bales
and boxes of unidentified cargo. The darkness was absolute. The dreary, nerve-racking noise
of the wearing-out Riccardo drive came from all sides. Other ship noises came from the fabric
of the ship.
Horn crawled, feeling his way, until he came to a metal plate which was the loading hatch in
the side of the hold. He began to fumble purposefully to circumnavigate the enclosure which
was his prison. He came to a corner and found a door, but it was dogged shut. He pressed his
ear against it. It would be impossible to open it from this side, but it opened into the working
parts of the ship.
He began to crawl over boxes and bales again, shaking those that could be moved. He found
a box in which things shifted with the shaking. He broke the box open. It contained small
heavy objects which he identified - guessing - as synthetic-sapphire-lined bearings for some sort
of machinery. They'd be worth hundreds of credits apiece because of the beautiful precision of
their manufacture. But to Horn they only had the value of being small heavy objects.