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

With a cry, the girl fled.
Alstair swung upon Jack. “I take back nothing,” he snapped. “You’re an
officer, by order of the commander. But you’re a Mut besides, and when I’m
commander of the Adastra you don’t stay an officer long! I’m warning you! What
were you doing here?”
Jack was deathly pale, but the status of officer on the Adastra, with
its consequent opportunity of seeing Helen, was far too precious to be given
up unless at the last extremity. And, besides, there was the work he had in
hand. His work, certainly, could not continue unless he remained an officer.
“I was installing an interference grid on the surface,” he said, “to try
to discover the sending station of the messages we’ve been getting. It will
also act, as you know, as an inductor up to a certain range, and in its range
is a good deal more accurate than the main inductors of the ship.”
“Then get to your damned work,” said Alstair harshly, “-and pay full
attention to it and less to romance!”
Jack plugged in the lead wire from his new grid to the pan-wave
receptor. For an hour he worked more and more grimly. There was something very
wrong. The inductors showed blank for all about the Adastra. The interference
grid showed an object of considerable size not more than two million miles
distant and to one side of the Adastra’s course. Suddenly, all indication of
that object’s existence blanked out. Every dial on the panwave receptor went
back to zero.
“Damnation!” said Jack under his breath.
He sat up a new pattern on the controls, calculated a moment and
deliberately changed the pattern on the spare bank of the main inductors, and
then simultaneously switched both instruments to their hew frequencies. He
waited, almost holding his breath, for nearly half a minute. It would take so
long for the inductor waves of the new frequency to reach out the two million
miles and then collapse into the analyzers and give their report of any object
in space which had tended to deform them.
Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight seconds. Every alarm bell on the
monstrous ship clanged furiously! Emergency doors hissed into place all over
the vessel, converting every doorway into an air lock. Seconds later, the
visiplates in the main control room began to flash alight.
“Reporting, Rocket Control!”
“Reporting, Air Service!”
“Reporting, Power Supply!”
Jack said crisply: “The main inductors report an object two million
miles distant with velocity in our direction. The commander is ill. Please
find Vice Commander Aistair.”
Then the door of the control room burst open and Aistair himself raged
into the room.
“What the devil!” he rasped. “Ringing a general alarm? Have you gone
mad? The inductors—”
Jack pointed to the main inductor bank. Every dial bore out the message
of the still clanging alarms. Alstair stared blankly at them. As he looked,
every dial went back to zero. And Alstair’s face went as blank as the dials.
“They felt out our inductor screens,” said Jack grimly, “and put out
some sort of radiation which neutralized them. So I set up two frequencies,
changed both, and they couldn’t adjust their neutralizers in time to stop our