"Murray Leinster - Planet of Sand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

survivor will destroy his own letter and make use of the other. Do you agree to that?"
"I'll agree to anything," said Stan Buckley fiercely," that will get my hands about your throat!"
Rob Torren shrugged.
"I've turned off the guard photocells," he said shortly. "I've a key for your cell. I'm going to let you out. I
can't afford to kill you except under the conditions I named or I'll have no chance to win Esther. If you kill
me under any other conditions, you'll simply be beamed as a murderer." He paused, and said shortly, "And
I have to come and fight you because a letter from you admitting that I've behaved honorably is the only
possible thing that would satisfy Esther. You give your word to wait until you've escaped and I come for
you before you try to kill me?"
Stan Buckley hesitated a long, long time. Then he said hi a thick voice:
"I give my word."
Without hesitation, Rob Torren put a key in the cell door and turned it. He stood aside. Stan Buckley
walked out, his hands clenched. Torren closed the door and re-locked it. He turned his back and walked
down the corridor. He opened the door at its end. Again he stood aside. Stan Buckley went through.
Torren closed the door, took a bit of cloth from his pocket, wiped off the key, hung it up again on a tiny
hook, with the same bit of cloth threw a switch, and put the cloth back in his pocket.
"The photocells are back on," he said in a dry voice. "They say you're still in your cell. When the guard
con-
tradicts them, you'll seem to have vanished into thin air."
"I'm doing this," said Stan hoarsely, "to get a chance to kill you. Of course I've no real chance to
escape!"
That was obvious. The Stallifer was deep in the void of interstellar space. She traveled at twelve
hundred tunes the speed of light. Escape from the ship itself was absurd. And concealment past
discovery when the ship docked was preposterous.
"That remains to be seen," said Torren coldly. "Come this way."
Down a hallway. He slipped into a narrow doorway, invisible unless one looked. Stan followed. He
found himself in that narrow, compartmented space between the ship's inner and outer skins. A door,
another compartment; another door. Then a tiny airlock—used for the egress or a single man to
inspect or repair such exterior apparatus as the scanners for the ship's vision screens. There was a
heap of assorted apparatus beside the airlock door.
"I prepared for this," said Torren curtly. "There's a spacesuit. Put it on. Here's a meteor miner's space
skid. There are supplies. I brought this stuff as luggage, in watertight cases. I'll fill the cases with my
bath water and get off the ship with the same weight of luggage I had when I came on. That's my
coverup."
"And I?" asked Stan harshly.
"You'll take this chrono. It's synchronized with the ship's navigating clock. At two-two even you push
oft from the outside of the ship. The drive field fluctuates. When it collapses, you'll be outside it.
When it expands—"
Stan Buckley raised his eyebrows. This was clever! The Bowdoin-Hall field which permits of faster
than speed of light travel is like a pulsating bubble expanding and contracting at rates ranging from
hundreds of thousands of times per second to the forty per second of deep space speed. When the
field is expanding, and bars of an artificial allotrope of carbon are acted upon by electrostatic forces
in a certain particular fashion, a ship and all its contents accelerate at a rate so great that it simply has
no meaning. As the field contracts, a ship decelerates again. That is the theory, at any rate. There is no
proof in sensations or instrument readings that such is the case. But velocity is
inversely proportional to the speed of the field's pulsations, and only hi deep space does a ship dare
slow the pulsations too greatly, for fear of complications.
A man in a spacesuit could detach himself from a space ship traveling by the Bowdoin-Hall field,
though. He could float free at the instant of the field's collapse, and be left behind when it expanded
again. But he would be left alone in illimitable emptiness.