"Rhodan, Perry - Killers from Hyperspace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rhodan Perry)

with the simple plan he had adopted it immediately. The Trox had met Tusnetze at
the trading post on Vallord where the patriarch had been thrown out of a bar in
a drunken stupor and had landed right in front of Vicheline's spindly legs.
"Help me up!" Tusnetze had stammered.
Since the Trox hardly weighed much more than 10 pounds against Tusnetze's
more than 250 pounds, his efforts to bring the Springer up from the muck of the
street were doomed to failure from the start. So Vicheline had squatted down
beside him. He began in his soft sing-song voice to say something but finally
waited until Tusnetze was capable of muttering more than unintelligible
syllables.
Actually it was several hours before the Springer stood up. He was getting
ready to turn his wobbling legs toward the bar again, where he said he wanted to
drink over a deal. But at that moment Vicheline had turned his single red eye
toward him and wore such a forlorn expression that the patriarch was momentarily
sobered by it.
"What the devil do you want?" he asked.
The Trox, not having a firm balance because of a lack of backbone, kept
bobbing up and down in front of him. "I want to leave Vallord, big man. Take me
with you!" he pleaded.
Tusnetze's roar of laughter caused the Trox to back away in alarm. But then
from a safe distance he revealed that he had gotten the course coordinates of
the robot ship from a secret source. Since Tusnetze's latest debauch had brought
him closer than ever to the brink of financial ruin, he was ready to grasp at
straws such as this one that was offered to him now, and so he had taken the
Trox on board the longship with him. To the astonishment of the crew he had
treated his strange guest with the most preferential courtesy. In fact,
Vicheline often crouched on the patriarch's shoulder, howling his senseless song
while gazing about at the shabby equipment of the Control Central with his
perpetually red eye.
At present the Tus II was poking its way about on the outer fringes of star
cluster M-13 and its search for the robot ship had come to an end.
"There it is!" shouted Tusnetze again.
There was an awed silence in the Control Central because nobody could
actually believe that the clan's streak of bad luck had ended. And yet such
viewscreens of the space surveillance system as were working revealed a clear
image of the spherical vessel. The Arkonide ship hovered there in the empty
void, alone and deserted.
"You were right, Vicheline," said Tusnetze in a grateful undertone. "We've
found the robot ship!"
The Trox interrupted his singsong humming and drifted slowly to the floor.
"It is yours, big man," he whispered. "You only have to take it."
The patriarch watched almost devoutly as the longship in this critical moment
was guided closer to the robot ship by Farosto, who was serving as the pilot.
The bad luck had ended! The value of the Arkonide vessel was tremendous. The
sale price would be enough to obtain two or three longships with first-class
equipment. Tusnetze secretly hoped that his sons, nephews and daughters who had
left him would return penitently to him now when they heard of this
unprecedented windfall.
But Tusnetze was more of a businessman than a dreamer and visionary. When he
analyzed his possibilities he had to confess that he'd face a number of problems