"E. E. Doc Smith - Skylark 3 - Skylark Of Valeron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

But let the prisoner make one false move, and those tiny beams of force would
instantly
become copper-driven rods of pure energy, hurling the luckless wight against
the wall of
the control room and holding him motionless there, in spite of the most
terrific exertions
of his mighty body.
DuQuesne lay at ease in his seat; or rather, scarcely touching the seat, he
floated at
ease in the air above it. His black brows were drawn together, his black eyes
were hard
-1-
as he studied frowningly the Fenachrone engineer. As usual, that worthy was
half inside
the power plant, coaxing those mighty engines to do even better than their
prodigious
best.
Feeling his companion's eyes upon him, the doctor turned his inscrutable stare
upon
Loring, who had been studying his chief even as DuQuesne had been studying the
outlander. Loring's cherubic countenance was as pinkly innocent as ever, his
guileless
blue eyes as calm and untroubled; but DuQuesne, knowing the man as he did,
perceived
an almost imperceptible tension and knew that the killer also was worried.
"What's the matter, Doll?" The saturnine scientist smiled mirthlessly. "Afraid
I'm going to
let that ape slip one over on us?"
"Not exactly." Loring's slight tenseness, however, disappeared. "It's your
party, and
anything that's all right with you tickles me half to death. I have known all
along you knew
that that bird there isn't working under compulsion. You know as well as I do
that nobody
works that way because they're made to. He's working for himself, not for us,
and I had
just begun to wonder if you weren't getting a little late in clamping down on
him."
"Not at all-there are good and sufficient reasons for this apparent delay. I
am going to
clamp down on him in exactly"-DuQuesne glanced at his wrist watch-"fourteen
minutes.
But you're keen-you've got a brain that really works-maybe I'd better give you
the whole
picture."
DuQuesne, approving thoroughly of his iron-nerved, cold-blooded assistant,
voiced again
the thought he had expressed once before, a few hours out from Earth; and
Loring
answered as he had then, in almost the same words-words which revealed truly