"(novel) (ebook) - Perry Rhodan 0072 - (64) The Ambassadors from Aurigel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Rhodan)

Wolley cursed profusely. "We're lucky that we don't have any newspapers on Grautier. People would laugh if somebody tried to tell them this is supposed to be a rocket with an atomic warhead."
Chellish and Mullon were amused by his angry outburst.
"I'm a first-class mechanic; at least that's what people always told me on Earth," Wolley claimed. "But this blasted thing here... I'd just as soon have nothing to do with it."
The thing had indeed not the slightest resemblance to the rocket which it was supposed to be. Instead of looking like a sleek, torpedo-shaped missile, it resembled a garbage can more than anything else. There were no stubwings or stabilizing fins. The container holding the bomb on top of the contraption looked like a bucket somebody had thrown away. The other end was open and inside a battery-driven electric motor could be seen and a gadget similar to a ventilator.
"What matters is that the gyroscope functions properly." Chellish patted Wolley on the shoulder, trying to calm him a little. "You don't have to worry much about the rest. This thing is going to be used only in empty space where you can forget all about aerodynamic contours.
"Oh, shucks!" Wolley muttered scratching his head.
The next man Chellish and Mullon went to see after coming back from the wreck of the Adventurous was Dr. Ashbury, a physician who now had become a chemist by force of circumstances. Ashbury was entrusted with the task of making enough oxyhydrogen gas to propel Wolley's garbage can rocket with reasonable speed.
To produce oxyhydrogen gas was not too difficult. Ashbury broke down water into its chemical components and filled separate containers with the oxygen and hydrogen. It would be far trickier to put the gases into Wolley's rocket and to put them under pressure.
After their visit at Ashbury's, Mullon invited Chellish to have dinner at his house, where they could find out what progress the 'commando team' had made. When they reached Mullon's house they saw Freddy, Mullon's wife, through the window, walking up and down the room gesticulating her arms; and when they entered the door of the house they could hear her pleading voice: "Expressions of belief, ignorance, doubt and so forth are followed by the subjunctive form of conjugation! Subjunctive! When are you going to get this through your thick skulls, gentlemen?"
Mullon opened the door leading into her room and was astounded to see nobody in the room except Freddy.
Chellish grinned. "You must have dressed down your students once too often. They preferred to leave."
"Oh no," she replied, annoyed. "I'm only practicing. These donkheads always make mistakes and I don't have the heart to reprimand them. So I've got to practice being stem like a teacher in school."
Mullon slouched in a chair. "Is it that bad?"
Freddy dismissed it with a gesture of her hand. "Not really. They've learned more in 2 weeks than pupils on Earth in 2 years. They're quite enthusiastic about it. Of course, nobody can learn to speak perfect French in only 4 weeks."
"But it won't be necessary to speak flawlessly," Chellish replied. "As long as the Whistlers hear another language than the one they already know. In most cases it'll be sufficient if only 2 or 3 men talk. My pronunciation leaves something to be desired but my grammar isn't too bad."
Freddy looked at him critically and changed the subject. "Are you going to freeload again here tonight?" she asked gruffly.
Chellish nodded. "Yes. I'm a poor devil who's got to mooch where he can."
"Did you do any good today?"
"Of course. I fixed a whole spaceship."
"So that it can fly again?"
"Exactly," Chellish replied.
Freddy suddenly was serious. "I know I should be happy about it but I can't make myself feel elated. How do I know that all this will end well?"
Mullon got up and put his arms around her shoulders. "Wait and see," he comforted her. "We'll be back in 2 months after raising so much hell among the Whistlers that they'll lose all desire to ever come back to Grautier."

* * * *

3 months had elapsed since the explosion of the atom bomb had destroyed the spaceship of the Whistlers and now the expedition was ready to take off with 13 men.
A great deal of preparation had gone into the expedition. The repair of the auxiliary ship, which had been given the name Fair Lady; Wolley's trouble with the garbage can rockets, of which he had built 2; and Ashbury's concern with the infusion of the oxyhydrogen mixture were only some of the problems that had to be solved before the start.
The settlers of Greenwich on the Green River now had 2 atom bombs available. They were made with the fissionable material taken from the reactors of the agricultural multipurpose machines furnished by the Whistlers. The nuclear material of 4 more reactors had to be stripped for the construction of Wolley's rockets to be taken aboard the Fair Lady.
A permanent radio connection with Capt. Blailey's Gazelle up in the mountains had been established so that Blailey could be kept informed during the time of Lt. Chellish's absence on Peep. Neither Blailey nor Greenwich would have any contact with Chellish on his mission but Blailey would still be in a position to come to the aid of the town in case of an attack.
A new script was developed as Chellish assumed that the Whistlers had not only learned something about their language but also a little about the writing and printing of the colonists. He didn't want to arouse their suspicion by using the same letters for the name of the spaceship on its spherical hull. All members of the team were instructed to write in the new style whenever they had to put down something in writing.
During the last days after Dr. Ashbury had overcome the difficulties of filling the fuel tanks of the rocket bomb with oxygen and hydrogen he became involved in many more requests by Chellish who wished to take a great number of other chemical concoctions on his trip. His demands as to quality, quantity and efficacy were far from modest.
It was a remarkable feat that all these preparations could be accomplished in 3 months. What helped to do the trick was the adequate amount of technological equipment the colonists still had available after some of the cargo aboard the Adventurous had been destroyed or rendered useless by its crash landing. But even with the best of tools the preparation for the start of the Fair Lady would have taken considerably more time if the people of Greenwich had not been so dedicated to their cause. Few of them seemed to realize the risk they ran by virtually declaring war on a neighbouring planet and thereby a whole alien race. They were swayed by their outrage against the humiliation they had suffered at the hands of the Whistlers who had believed they could degrade 8,000 Terrans as slaves.
However, despite the hurry with which they worked on the preparations, nothing was overlooked and everything was put in its proper place. All technical aspects were treated with such meticulous care that by all human standards a failure of the expedition was quite improbable.
The evening before the start Chellish and his friends Mullon, O'Bannon and Milligan went over again every detail of their mission. Each one had been assigned a special task for outfitting the ship and the other preliminaries for the enterprise and each gave an account of the work he had accomplished. After the last one had finished his report it seemed that nothing had been forgotten.
The Fair Lady lifted off early the next morning on the 16th of August of the new Grautier era.





2/ ARRIVAL ON HEENINNIY

Uju-Riel was the first to see the alien spaceship. He noticed a tiny fast-moving blip on his radar screen which he first took for some kind of a freak reflex because in his opinion it was impossible for a vessel to move as rapidly as the blip indicated.
Such interference reflexes usually quickly disappeared but the, point wandered across the upper area of the screen and moved out to the left edge. Uju-Riel was startled and he tried to compute the velocity of the object. The radar had picked it up at an altitude of 300 kilometres and the blip had taken about 6 seconds to get across the width of the screen. Therefore he figured that the object moved at a speed of approximately 20 kilometres per second.
The only ships which could travel that fast were the interplanetaries. Yet of the 3 such vessels that existed in their world he knew that one was at this time on a trip to Weelie-Wee under the command of Capt. Sey-Wuun and the other 2 were confined to their starting pads at Sielij and Heejii.
Uju-Riel hesitated a minute but then decided to give alarm. He reported that he had observed a foreign object at an altitude of 300 kilometres which moved at a velocity of about 20 kilometres per second from northeast to southwest and that he considered it prudent to pass on this information before a disaster occurred.
As everybody knew that the ship under Capt. Sey-Wuun's command couldn't possibly have returned yet, Uju-Riel's report was at first ridiculed. But half an hour later Uju-Riel observed the same radar reflex once again and this time it was close enough so that the other less sensitive instruments could pick it up as well. Moreover, the Central Electromagnetic Observation Station received at the same time an undecipherable radio message which obviously came from the foreign flying object so that Uju-Riel was vindicated and it was his turn to laugh at his superiors.
Admiral Wee-Nii called a full alarm for the entire Airfleet of His Excellency the President-King and ordered the airport commanders to hold their machines ready to take off. Meanwhile Iiy-Juur-Eelie was informed about the strange incident and requested to give his instructions. However Iiy-Juur-Eelie was in no rush to issue his commands until his Fleet Admiral advised him as to all the facts he had learned about the foreign flying object and that it had radioed a message which the experts were trying to decipher with the greatest urgency. So far nothing had happened anywhere on the planet which would indicate that the unknown craft approached with hostile intentions and, finally, that it was obvious, to judge from the flight performance of the alien craft, that it was far superior to anything his own fleet could muster.
It was mainly this last argument which caused Iiy-Juur-Eelie to give orders not to take any military measures against the aliens but to send signals from the airport in the vicinity of the capital asking them to land. He hoped that they would get the idea and follow his invitation.