"Murray Leinster - The Duplicators" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

permission to land and was threatened with destruction if it did. The yacht took pictures from space showing specks that
could be villages or the ruins of same, but this is doubtful. No other landings or communications are known. Any records
which might have existed on Suheil 11 were destroyed in the Economic Wars on that planet."
In the Glamorgan's control room, Link was intrigued. He went back to the abbreviations and deciphered them. Sord was a
yellow sol-type sun with a mass of 1.4 sols and many faculae. Its third planet was believed habitable. It had an oxygen
atmosphere, two-thirds of its surface was sea, the sea was normal brine and there were the usual ice caps and cloud systems
of a planet whose habitability was estimated at one.
And two centuries ago its inhabitants had threatened to smash a spaceyacht which wanted to land on it.
According to Thistlethwaite, the bill for last evening's relaxation, for Link, amounted to twenty-some years to be served in
jail. Even with some sentences running concurrently, it was preferable not to return to Trent. On the other hand-
But it didn't really need to be thought about. Thistlethwaite plainly intended' to go to Sord Three, whose inhabitants
strongly preferred to be left alone. But they seemed to have made an exception in his favor. He was so anxious to get there
and so confident of a welcome that he'd bought the Glamorgan and loaded her up with freight, and he'd taken an unholy
chance in his choice of a ship. He'd taken another in depending on Link as an astrogator. But it would be a pity to
disappoint him!
So Link carefully copied down in the log the three coordinates of Sord Three, and hunted up its proper solar motion, and
put that in the log, and then put the figures for Trent in the computer and copied the answer in the log, too. It seemed the
professional thing to do. Then he scraped away frost from the ports and got observations of the Glamorgan's current
heading, and went back to the board and adjusted that. He was just entering the last item in the log when Thistlethwaite
came in. His hands were black from the work he'd done, and somehow he gave the impression of a man who had used up
all his store of naughty words and still was unrelieved.
"Well?" asked Link pleasantly.
"We're leakin' air," said the whiskered man bitterly. "It's whistlin' out! Playin' tunes as it goes! I had to seal off the
spaceboat blister. If we need that spaceboat we'll be in a fix! When my business gets goin', I'll never use another junk ship
like this! You raised hell in that take-off!"
'It's very bad?" asked Link.
"I shut off all the compartments I couldn't seal tight," said Thistlethwaite bitterly. "And there's still some leakage in the
engine room, but I can't find it. I ain't found it so far, anyways!"
Link said,
"How's the air supply?"
"I pumped up on Trent," said the little man. If they'd known, they'd ha' charged me for that, too!"
"Can we make out for two weeks?" asked Link.
"We can make out for ten!" snapped the whiskery one. "There's only two of us an' we can seal off everything but the
control room an' the engine room an' a way between 'em. We can go ten weeks!"
"Then," said Link relievedly, "we're all right." He made final adjustments. "The engines are all right?"
He looked up pleasantly, his hand on a switch.
"With coddlin'," said Thistlethwaite. "What're you doin?" he demanded suspiciously. "I ain't give you—"
Link threw the circuit-completing switch. The universe seemed to reel. Everything appeared to turn inside out, including
Link's stomach. He had the feeling of panicky fall in a contracting spiral. The lights in the control room dimmed almost to
extinction. The whiskery man uttered a strangled howl. This was the normal experience when going into overdrive travel at
a number of times the speed of light.
Then, abruptly, everything was all right again. The vision-ports were dark, but the lights came back to full brightness. The
Glamorgan was in overdrive, hurtling through emptiness very, very much faster than theory permitted in the normal
universe. But the universe immediately around the Glamorgan was not normal. The ship was in an overdrive field, which
does not occur normally, at all.
"What the hell've you done?" raged Thistlethwaite. "Where you headed for? I didn't tell you—"
"I'm driving the ship," said Link pleasantly, "for a place called Sord Three. There ought to be some good business
prospects there. Isn't that where you want to go?"
The little man's face turned purple. He glared.
"How'd you find that out?" he demanded ferociously.