"Murray Leinster - Proxima Centauri" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

“I don’t believe Alstair!” said the girl evenly. “And, anyhow, it was
Jack who caught the signals. And he’s the one who’s working with them, officer
or Mut! And he’s human, anyhow. It’s time for the signals to come again and
you depend on him to handle them.”
The old man frowned. He walked with a careful steadiness to a seat. He
sat down with an old man’s habitual and rather pathetic caution. The Adastra,
of course, required no such constant vigilance at the controls as the
interplanetary space ships require. Out here in emptiness there was no need to
watch for meteors, for traffic, or for those queer and yet inexplicable force
fields which at first made interplanetary flights so hazardous.
The ship was so monstrous a structure, in any case, that the tinier
meteorites could not have harmed her. And at the speed she was now making
greater ones would be notified by the induction fields in time for observation
and if necessary the changing of her course.
A door at the side of the control room opened briskly and a man stepped
in. He glanced with conscious professionalism at the banks of indicators. A
relay clicked, and his eyes darted to the spot. He turned and saluted the old
man with meticulous precision. He smiled at the girl.
“Ah, Aistair,” said the old man. “You are curious about the signals,
too?”
“Yes, sir. Of course! And as second in command I rather like to keep an
eye on signals. Gary is a Mut, and I would not like him to gather information
that might be kept from the officers.”
“That’s nonsense!” said the girl hotly.
“Probably,” agreed Alstair. “I hope so. I even think so. But I prefer to
leave out no precaution.”
A buzzer sounded. Alstair pressed a button and a vision plate lighted. A
dark, rather grim young face stared out of it.
“Very well, Gary,” said Alstair curtly.
He pressed another button. The vision plate darkened and lighted again
to show a long corridor, down which a solitary figure came. It came close and
the same face looked impassively out. Aistair said even more curtly: “The
other doors are open, Gary. You can come straight through.”
“I think that’s monstrous!” said the girl angrily as the plate clicked
off. “You know you trust him! You would have to! Yet every time he comes into
officers’ quarters. you act as if you thought he had bombs in each hand and
all the rest of the men behind him!”
Aistair shrugged and glanced at the old man, who said tiredly, “Aistair
is second in command, my dear, and he will be commander on the way back to
Earth. I could wish you would be less offensive.”
But the girl deliberately withdrew her eyes from the brisk figure of
Aistair with its smart uniform, and rested her chin in her hands to gaze
broodingly at the farther wall. Alstair went to the banks of indicators,
surveying them in detail. The ventilator hummed softly. A relay clicked with a
curiously smug, self-satisfied note. Otherwise there was no sound.
The Adastra, mightiest work of the human race, hurtled on through space
with the light of a strange sun shining faintly upon her enormous hull. Twelve
lambent purple flames glowed from holes in her forward part. She was
decelerating, lessening her speed by thirty-two point two feet per second per
second, maintaining the effect of Earth’s gravity within her bulk.