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

"Why, I've got friends there," said Link untruthfully.
The little man leaped for him, uttering howls of fury.
Link turned off the ship's gravity. Thistlethwaite wound up bouncing against the ceiling. He clung there, swearing. Link
kept his hand on the gravity button. At any instant he could throw the gravity back on, and as immediately off again.
'Tut, tut!" said Link reproachfully. "Such naughty words. And I thought you'd be pleased to find your junior partner
displaying energy and enthusiasm and using his brains loyally to further the magnificent business enterprise we've started!"
II
THE Glamorgan bored on through space. Not normal space, of course. In the ordinary sort of space between suns and
planets and solar systems generally, a ship is strictly limited to ninety-eight-point-something per cent of the speed of light,
because mass increases with speed, and inertia increases with mass. But in an overdrive field the properties of space are
modified. The effect of a magnet on iron is changed past recognition. The effect of electrostatic stress upon dielectrics is
wholly abnormal. And inertia, instead of multiplying itself with high velocity, becomes as undetectable as at zero velocity.
In fact, theory says that a ship has no velocity on an overdrive field. The speed is of the field itself. The ship is carried. It
goes along for the ride.
But there was no thinking about such abstractions on the Glamorgan. The effect of overdrive was the same as if the ship
did pierce space at many times the speed of light Obviously, light from ahead was transposed a great many
octaves upward, into something as different from light as longwave radiation is from heat. This radiation was refracted
outward from the ship by the overdrive field, and was therefore without effect upon instruments or persons. Light from
behind was left there. Light from the sides was also refracted outward and away. The Glamorgan floated at ease in a
hurtling, unsubstantial space-stress center, and to try to understand it might produce a headache, but hardly anything more
useful.
But though the Glamorgan in overdrive attained the end of speed without the need for velocity, the human relationship
between Link and Thistlethwaite was less simple. The whiskery little man was impassioned about his enterprise. Link had
guessed his highly secret destination, and Thistlethwaite was outraged by the achievement. Even when Link showed him
how Sord Three had been revealed as the objective of the voyage, Thistlethwaite wasn't mollified. He clamped his lips shut
tightly. He refused to give any further intimation about what he proposed to do when he arrived at Sord Three. Link knew
only that he'd touched ground there in a space-boat with one companion and they'd left with a valuable cargo, and now
Thistlethwaite was bound back there again, if Link could get him there.
There were times when it seemed doubtful. Then Link blamed himself for trying it. Still, Thistlethwaite had chosen the
Glamorgan on his own and had gotten as far as Trent in her. But there were times when it didn't appear that the ship would
ever get anywhere else. The log book had a plenitude of emergencies written in its pages as the Glamorgan went onward.
She leaked air. They didn't try to keep the inside pressure up to the standard 14.7 pounds. They compromised on eleven,
because they'd loose less air at the lower pressure. Even so, the fact that the Glamorgan leaked was only one of her
oddities. She also smelled. Her air system was patched and
her generators were cobbled, and at odd moments she made unrefined noises for no reason that anybody could find out.
The water pressure system sometimes worked and sometimes did not. The refrigeration unit occasionally turned on when it
shouldn't and sometimes didn't when it should. It was wise to tap the thermostat several times a day to keep frozen stores
from thawing.
The overdrive field generator was also a subject for nightmares. Link didn't understand overdrive, but he did know that a
field shouldn't be kept in existence by hand-wound outer layers on some of the coils, with wedges driven in to keep
contacts tight which ought to be free to cut off in case of emergency. But it could be said that everything about the ship was
an emergency. Link would have come to have a very great respect for Thistlethwaite because he kept such tinkered
wreckage working. But he was appalled at the idea of anybody deliberately trusting his life to it.
The thing was, he realized ultimately, that Thistlethwaite was an eccentric. The galaxy-is full of crackpots, each of whom
has mysterious secret information about illimitable wealth to be found on the non-existent outer planets of rarely visited
suns, or in the depths of the watery satellites of Cepheids. But crackpots only talk. Their ambition is to be admired as men
of mystery and vast secret knowledge. They will never try actually to find the treasures they claim to know about. If you
offer to provide a ship* and crew to pick up the riches they describe in such detail, they'll impose impossible conditions.
They don't want to risk their dreams by trying to make them come true.
But Thistlethwaite wasn't that way. He wasn't a crackpot. '.-: his description of the wealth awaiting him, Link con-?:dered