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

reply. Link checked the ship's heading again, glanced at the ship's chronometer, and threw the overdrive on.
Nothing happened except vertigo and nausea and the feeling of falling in a spiral fashion toward nowhere at all. The
Glamorgan was again in overdrive. The little man came in, brushing off his hands.
"That's the way," he said truculently, "to handle this ship!"
Link scribbled a memo of the instant the Glamorgan had gone into overdrive.
"In two days, four hours, thirty-three minutes and twenty seconds," he observed, "we'll want to break out again. We ought
to be somewhere near Sord, then."
"If," said Thistlethwaite suspiciously, "if you're not tryin' to put something over on me!" j
Link shrugged. He'd begun to wonder, lately, why he'd
come on this highly mysterious journey. In one sense he'd had good reason. Jail. But now he began to be restless. He wore
a stake-belt next to his skin, and in it he had certain small crystals. There were people who would murder him
enthusiastically for those crystals. There were others who would pay him very large sums for them. The trouble was that he
had no specific idea of what he wanted to do with a large sum. Small sums, yes. He could relax with them. But large
ones— He felt a need for the pleasingly unexpected. Even the exciting.
One day passed and he was definitely impatient. He was bored. He couldn't even think of anything to write in the log book.
There'd been a girl about whom he'd felt romantic, not so long ago. He tried to think sentimentally about her. He failed. He
hadn't seen her in months and she was probably married to somebody else now. The thought didn't bother him. It was
annoying that it didn't. He craved excitement and interesting happenings, and he was merely heading for a planet that
hadn't made authenticated contact with the rest of the galaxy in two hundred years, and then had promised to shoot
anybody who landed. He was only in a leaky ship whose machinery broke down frequently and might at any time burn out.
He was, in a word, bored.
The second day passed. Four hours, thirty-three minutes remained. He tried to hope for interesting events. He knew of no
reason to anticipate them. If Thistlethwaite were right, there would be only business dealings aground, and presently an
attempt to get to somewhere else in the Glamorgan, and after that-
The whiskery man went down into the engine room and bellowed that everything was set. Link sat by the control board,
leaning on his elbows, in a mood of deep skepticism. He didn't believe anything in particular was likely to happen.
Especially he didn't believe in Thistlethwaite's story of
fabulous wealth. There was nothing as valuable as Thistle-thwaite described. Such things simply didn't exist. But
since he'd come this far-Two minutes to go. One minute twenty seconds. Twenty seconds. Ten . . . five . . . four . . .
three . . . two . . . onel
He flipped the overdrive switch to off. There were the customary sensations of dizzy fall and vertigo and nausea.
Then the Glamorgan floated in normal space, and there was a sun not unreasonably far away, and all the sky was
stars. Link was even pessimistic about the identity of the sun, but a spectro-photo identified it. It was truly Sord.
There were planets. One. Two. Three. Three had ice-caps; it looked as if two-thirds of its surface was sea, and in
general it matched the Directory's description. It might . . . just possibly . . . be inhabited.
A tediously long time later the Glamorgan floated in orbit around the third planet out from its sun. Mottled land
masses whipped by below. There were seas, and more land masses.
Thistlethwaite watched in silence. There could be no communication with the ground, even if the ground was
prepared to communicate. The Glamorgan's communication-system didn't work. Link waited for the little man to
identify his destination. When it was named there would probably be trouble.
"No maps," said Thistlethwaite bitterly, on the second time around. "I asked Old Man Addison for a map but he
hardly knew what I meant. They never bothered to make 'em! But Old Man Addison's Household is near a sea. Near
a bay, with mountains not too far off."
Link was not relieved. It isn't easy to find a landmark of limited size on a large world from a ship in space that has no
maps or even a working communicator. But on the
fourth orbital circuit, clouds that had formerly hidden a certain place had moved away. Thistlethwaite pointed.
"That's it!" he said, scowling as if to cover his own doubts. "That's it! Get her down yonder!"
Link took a deep breath. Standard spaceport procedure is for a ship to call down by communicator, have coordinates
supplied from the ground, get into position, and wait. Then the landing grid reaches out its forcefields and lets the
ship down. It is neat, and comfortable, and safe. But there was no landing grid here. There was no information. And