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

"You'll straddle the space skid," said Torren shortly. "It's full-powered—good for some millions of
miles. At two-two exactly the Stallifer will be as close to Khor Alpha as it will go. Khor Alpha's a
dwarf white star that's used as a course marker. It has one planet that the directories say has a
breathable atmosphere, and list as a possible landing refuge, but which they also say is unexamined.
You'll make for that planet and land. You'll make for that planet and wait for me. I'll come!"
Stan Buckley said in soft ferocity:
"I hope so!"
Torren's rage flared.
"Do you think I'm not as anxious to kill you as you are to kill me?"
For an instant the two tensed, as if for a struggle to the death there between the two skins of the space
ship. Then Torren turned away.
"Get in your suit," he said curtly. "I'll get a private flier and come after you as soon as the hearing
about your disappearance is over. Push off at two-two even. Make it exact!"
He went angrily away, and Stan Buckley stared after him, hating him, and then grimly turned to the
apparatus on an untidy heap beside the airlock door.
Five minutes later he opened the outer door of the lock. He was clad in space armor and carried with
him a small pack of supplies—the standard abandon ship kit—and the little space drive unit. The unit
was one of those space skids used by meteor miners—merely a shaft which contained the drive and
power unit, a seat, and a crossshaft by which it was steered. It was absurdly like a hobby-horse for a
man in a spacesuit, and it was totally unsuitable for interplanetary work because it consumed too
much power
when fighting gravity. For Stan, though, starting in mid-space with only one landing to make, it
should be adequate.
He locked the chrono where he could see it on the steering bar. He strapped the supply kit in place.
He closed the airlock door very softly, he waited, clinging to the outer skin of the ship with magnetic
shoes.
The cosmos seemed very small and quite improbable. The specks of light which were suns seemed to
crawl here and there. Because of their motion it was impossible to think of them as gigantic, revening
balls of unquenchable fire. They moved! To all appearances, the Stallifer flowed onward in a cosmos
perhaps a dozen miles in diameter, in which many varicolored fireflies moved with vast deliberations.
The hand of the chrono moved, and moved, and moved. At two-two exactly, Stan pressed the drive
stud. At one instant he and his improbable space steed rested firmly against a thousand-foot hill of
glistening chrome steel. The waverings of the Bowdoin-Hall field were imperceptible. The cosmos
was small and limited and the Stallifer was huge. Then the skid's drive came on. It shot away from the
hull—and the ship vanished as utterly as a blown out candle flame. The universe was so vast as to
produce a cringing sensation hi the man who straddled an absurd small device hi such emptiness, with
one cold white sun— barely near enough to show a disk—and innumerable remote and indifferent
stars on every hand.
On the instant the ship's field contracted and left him outside, Stan had lost the incredible velocity the
field imparts. In the infinitesimal fraction of a second required for the field to finish its contraction
after leaving him, the ship had traveled literally thousands of miles. In the slightly greater fraction of
a second required for it to expand again, it had moved on some millions of miles. By the time Stan's
mind had actually grasped the fact that he was alone in space, the ship from which he had separated
himself was probably fifty of sixty millions of miles away.
He was absolutely secure against recapture, of course. If his escape went unnoticed for even half a
minute, it would take all the ships of all the Space-Guard a thousand years to search the volume of
space in whiich one small space-
suited figure might be found. It was unlikely that his escape would be noticed for hours.
He was very terribly alone. A dwarf white sun glowed palely, many, many millions of miles away.
Stars gazed at him incuriously, separated by light centuries of space.