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

with it! Only, as a matter of pure precaution-
His expression changed suddenly. He'd been trying not to think of the consequences of having no
sight of the cosmos outside the ship. Now he remembered the electron telescope. It had not been in
circuit, so it could not have been burned out like his vision screens. He switched it on. A star-
field appeared over his head.
"Chee-chee!" cried Murgatroyd hysterically.
Calhoun glanced at him. The jerking of the ship had shifted the instruments in the rack to which
Murgatroyd clung. Clipped into place though they were, they'd caught Murgatroyd's tail and pinched
it tightly.
"You'll have to wait," snapped Calhoun. "Right now I've got to make us look like a successful
accident. Otherwise, whoever tried to spread us all over the cabin walls will try something else!"
The Med Ship flung through space in whatever direction and at whatever velocity it had possessed
when the grid field blew. Calhoun shifted the electron-telescope field and simultaneously threw on
the emergency rocket controls. There
was a growling of the pencil-thin, high-velocity blasts. There was a surging of the ship.
"No straight-Line stuff," Calhoun reminded himself.
He swung the ship into a dizzy spiral, as if innumerable things had been torn or battered loose in
the ship and its rockets had come on of themselves. Painstakingly, he jettisoned in one explosive
burst all the stored waste of his journey which could not be disposed of while in overdrive. To
any space-scanning instrument on the ground, it would look like something detonating violently
inside the ship.
"Now-"
The planet Marris III swung across the electron telescope's field. It looked hideously near, but
that was the telescope's magnification. Yet Calhoun sweated. He looked at the nearest-object dial
for reassurance. The planet was nearer by a thousand miles.
"Hah!" said Calhoun.
He changed the ship's spiral course. He changed it again. He abruptly reversed the direction of
its turn. Adequate training in space combat could have helped plot an evasion course, but it might
have been recognizable. Nobody could anticipate his maneuvers now, though. He adjusted the
telescope next time the planet swept across its field, and flipped on the photorecorder. Then he
pulled out of the spiral, whirled the ship until the city was covered by the telescope, and ran
the recorder as long as he dared keep a straight course. Then he swooped toward the planet in a
crazy, twisting fall with erratic intermissions, and made a final lunatic dash almost parallel to
the planet's surface.
At five hundred miles he unshielded the ports, which of necessity had to be kept covered in clear
space. There was a sky which was vividly bright with stars. There was a vast blackness off to
starboard which was the night side of the planet.
He went down. At four hundred miles the outside-pressure indicator wavered away from its pin. He
used it like a Pilot-tube recording, doing sums in his head to figure the static pressure that
should exist at this height, to compare with the dynamic pressure produced by his velocity through
the
near hard vacuum. The pressure should have been substantially zero. He swung the ship end-for-end
and killed velocity to bring the pressure indication down. The ship descended. Two hundred miles.
He saw the thin bright line of sunshine at the limb of the planet. Down to one hundred. He cut the
rockets and let the ship fall silently, swinging its nose up,
At ten miles he listened for man-made radiation. There was nothing in the electromagnetic spectrum
but the crackling of static in an electric storm which might be a thousand miles away. At five
miles height the nearest-object indicator, near the bottom of its scale, 'wavered in a fashion to
prove that he was still moving laterally across mountainous country. He swung the ship and killed
that velocity too.