"Gimmick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

GIMMICK

BY KATHERINE MACLEAN



When an individual thinks he'll lose the fight, he runs. When he thinks he can win the fight, he attacks. And neither one of these actions really requires, thinking. But there's nothing so effective as a complete and total stalemate to induce cogent, rational thinking!

Illustrated by Vidmer



A distant boom rattled the corridor. Bob Calland passed the ammunition and sucked a cut finger, tired and sweaty, his arms aching from the weight of the small heavy space torpedoes. He wondered briefly if he should recommend that torpedoes have rough sides for gripping, and then had the further precise thought that whatever his answer to such problems, they would not appear on a report.

Any ship whose loading system was cut in the first enemy blow was not going to survive. That included him.

It was amusing that the small spaceship had come out merely to target test a new homing rocket that was supposed to be effective against the evasive speed of Furry ships. In the stories it was inventions which saved everything at the last minute.

The loading stopped inexplicably, and he straightened and stood breathing deeply, counting the probable time left to the crippled ship. It was very little.

"Time to invent another gizmo," said Calland, and laughed hysterically for five minutes, at the end of which time the badly disco-ordinated loading system resumed flow and he passed some more ammunition.

The air pressure began to drop and the hollow boom of slamming air-compartment walls came closer. The spaceship was being carved apart, its insides opened out to the airlessness of space.

Ten minutes later it was all over. Bob Calland found himself in the dark with a feeling of falling slowly from a great height which slowly became the familiar sensation of weightless floating. The ship's spin had stopped somewhere in a dimly remembered interval of jolts and dizzy spinning of walls, with the lights flickering on and off and tremendous bewildering noise. The air was thin, but it was still there; he could still breathe. And the noise had stopped. The Furries had the ship.







He wondered if they were searching through it for survivors, and remembered that he had the insignia of a high-ranking technical officer, the rank they had assigned him for mobility as an observer from a Design Research and Testing base. If they found him, they would question him. If they had noticed that the few torpedoes they had ducked seemed to be of a new design, they might be specifically searching for the observer. They might be looking for him. With a minimum of motion he began stripping off the insignia from his sleeves.

The motion set him spinning weightlessly. In the dark his hand brushed clothing that was not his. Someone else's clothing. It was completely unexpected, for he had had no feeling of anyone being close to him. As he yanked his hand back reflexively his fingers brushed across something else that felt like soft lumpy leather. With instinctive revulsion, he pushed, and something heavy and limp gave inertly and drifted away.

A dead man.

His throat went stiff and his neck hair prickled, but he saw the practical aspects of what he had found, and he forced himself to think about what he should do. He and the body were drifting away from each other now. It had insignia on its shirt sleeve which would indicate a man who would not know enough to be worth questioning. He had to find it in the dark and change shirts.

Calland waited until he drifted into contact with the opposite wall, then pushed himself back in the direction he had pushed the corpse.

After he had left contact with it he realized that the wall had been warm, almost hot, and flat instead of curved like the usual corridor walls. It was one of the air-preserving walls which had fallen between himself and the rest of the ship, and something was heating it on the other side. It was possible that the Furries were on that side, cutting through. He floated in darkness and silence as thick as black cotton. If they were cutting through the walls to get at him, why the eerie silence?

Absolute darkness. Drifting, he stretched his hands out before him, steeling himself against the fear of that dry soft leather touch he had felt before.

Then he wondered if he had turned without feeling the turn, and had a sudden conviction that he was stretching his hands towards where he had been, drifting backward into the embrace of a dead body. He began to swing his arms in sudden panic, just as his left shoulder touched something smooth and flat and searingly cold. Before he could check himself, an elbow jolted into the cold surface and shoved him away from contact.

He drifted, spinning around and around in the dark, his shoulder tingling from the icy contact.