"Murray Leinster - The Mutant Weapon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

was worthwhile. There was no problem of human ecological adjustment it had so far been unable to
solve, and there were some dozens of planets whose human colonies
owed their existence to it. There Was nowhere, nowhere at at all, that a Med Ship was not welcomed
on its errand from headquarters.
"Aground there!" said Calhoun sharply. "What's the matter? Are you landing me or not?"
There was no answer. Then, suddenly, every sound-producing device in the ship abruptly emitted a
hoarse arid monstrous noise. The Lights flashed up and circuit breakers cut them off. The nearest-
object horn squawked. The hull-temperature warning squealed. The ship's internal gravity field
tugged horribly, for an instant and went off. Every device within the ship designed to notify
emergency clanged or shrieked or roared or screamed. There was a momentary bedlam.
It lasted for part of a second only. Then everything stopped. , There was no weight within the
ship, and there were no lights. There was dead silence, and Murgatroyd made whimpering sounds in
the darkness.
Calhoun thought absurdly to himself, According to the book, this is an unfavorable chance
consequence of something or other. But it was more than an unfavorable chance occurrence. It was
an intentional and drastic and possibly a deadly one.
"Somebody's acting up," said Calhoun measuredly, in the blackness. "What the hell's the matter
with them?"
He flipped the screen switch to bring back vision of what was outside. The vision screens of a
ship are very carefully fused against overload burnouts, because there is nothing in all the
cosmos quite as helpless and foredoomed as a ship which is blind in the emptiness of space. But
the screens did not light again. They couldn't. The cutouts hadn't worked in time.
Calhoun's scalp crawled. But asjhis eyes adjusted, he saw the pale fluorescent handles of switches
and doors. They hadn't been made fluorescent in expectation of an emergency like this, of course,
but they would help a great deal. He knew what had happened. It could only be one thing-a landing-
grid field clamped on the fifty-ton Med Ship with the power needed to grasp and land a twenty-
thousand-ton
liner. At that strength it would paralyze every instrument and blow every cutoff. It could not be
accidental. The reception of the news of his identity, the repeated request that he identify


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himself, and then the demand that he wait . . . This murderous performance was deliberate.
"Maybe," said Calhoun in the inky-black cabin, "as a Med Ship our arrival is an unfavorable chance
consequence of something-and somebody means to keep us from happening. It looks like it."
Murgatroyd whimpered.
"And I think," added Calhoun coldly, "that somebody may need a swift kick in the negative
feedback!"
He released himself from the safety belt and dived across the cabin in which there was now no
weight at all. In the blackness he opened a cabinet door. What he did inside was customarily done
by a man wearing thick insulated gloves, in the landing grid back at headquarters. He threw
certain switches which would allow the discharge of the power-storage cells which worked the Med
Ship's overdrive. Monstrous quantities of energy were required to put even a fifty-ton ship into
overdrive, and monstrous amounts were returned when it came out. The power amounted to ounces of
pure, raw energy, and as a safety precaution such amounts were normally put into the Duhanne cells
only just before a Med Ship's launching, and drained out again on its return. But now, Calhoun
threw switches which made a rather incredible amount of power available for dumping into the
landing-grid field about him- if necessary.