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

He floated back to the control chair.
The ship lurched. Violently. It was being moved by the grid field without any gentleness at all.
Calhoun's hands barely grasped the back of his pilot's chair before the jerk came, and it almost
tore them free. He just missed being flung against the back of the cabin by the applied
acceleration. But he was a long way out from the planet. He was at the end of a lever fifty
thousand miles long, and for that lever to be used to shake him too brutally would require special
adjustments. But somebody was making them. The jerk reversed directions. "He was flung savagely
against the
chair to which he'd been clinging. He struggled. Another yank, in another direction. Another one
still. It flung him violently into the chair.
Behind him, Murgatroyd squealed angrily as he went hurtling across the cabin. He grabbed for
holding places with all four paws and his tail.
Another shake. Calhoun had barely fastened the safety belt before a furious jolt nearly flung him
out of it again to crash against the cabin ceiling. Still another vicious surge of acceleration,
and he scrabbled for the controls. The yanking and plunging of the ship increased intolerably. He
was nauseated. Once he was thrust so furiously into the control chair that the was on the verge of
blacking out; and then the direction of thrust was changed to the exact opposite so that the blood
rushing to his head seemed about to explode it. His arms flailed out of control. He became dazed.
But when his hands were flung against the control board, he tried, despite their bruising, to
cling to the control-knobs, and each time he threw them over. Practically all his circuits were
blown, but there was one-
His numbing fingers threw it. There was a roar so fierce that it seemed to be an explosion. He'd
reached the switch which made effective the discharge circuit of his Duhanne cells. He'd thrown
it. It was designed to let the little ship's overdrive power reserve flow into storage at
headquarters on return from duty. Now, though, it poured into the landing field outside. It
amounted to hundreds of millions of kilowatt hours, delivered in the fraction of a second. There
was the smell of ozone. The sound was like a thunderclap.
But abruptly there was a strange and incredible peace. The lights came on waveringly as his
shaking fingers restored the circuit breakers. Murgatroyd shrilled indignantly, clinging
desperately to an instrument rack. But the vision screens did not light again. Calhoun swore.
Swiftly, he threw more circuit restorers. The nearest-object indicator told of the presence of
Maris III at forty-odd thousand miles. The hull-temperature indicator was up some fifty-six
degrees. The internal-gravity field came on faintly, and then built up to normal. But the screens
would not light. They were per-
manently dead. Calhoun raged for seconds. Then he got hold of himself.
"Chee-chee-cheel" chattered Murgatroyd desperately. "Chee-chee!"
"Shut up!" growled Calhoun. "Some bright lad aground thought up a new way to commit murder. Damned
near got away with it, too! He figured he'd shake us to death like a dog does a rat, only he was
using a landing-grid field to do it with. Right now, I hope I fried him!"
But it was not likely. Such quantities of power as are used to handle twenty-thousand-ton
spaceliners are not controlled direct, but by relays. The power Calhoun had flung into the grid
field should have blown out the grid's transformers with a spectacular display of fireworks, but
it was hardly probable it had gotten back to the individual at the controls.
"But I suspect," observed Calhoun vengefully, "that he'll consider this business an unfavorable
occurrence. Somebody'11 twist his tail too, either for trying what he did or for not getting away


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