"Smith, E E Doc - Subspace 01 - Subspace Explorers V2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

received. In these circumstances you need not `Doctor' me. `Adams' will do very nicely."

"I'm going to call you `Uncle Andy'," Barbara said with a grin. "Now, Uncle Andy, in view
of what you said, one of your eight doctorates is in medicine." "Naturally."

"Are you any good at obstetrics?"

"In the present instance I feel perfectly safe in saying.."

"Wait a minute!" Deston snapped. "Bobby, you are not...

"I am too! That is, I don't suppose I am yet, but with him aboard I'm certainly going to. I
want to, and if we don't get back both Bun and I will have to. Castaways' Code. So
there!"

Deston started to say something, but Barbara forestalled him. "But for right now, it's high
time we all got some sleep."

It was and they did; and next morning the three men wafted themselves across a few
hundred yards of space to the crippled liner. Floodlights were rigged.

"What . . . a . . . mess." Deston's voice was low and wondering. "The Top especially . . .
but the Middle and the Tail don't look too bad."

Inside, however, devastation had gone deep into the Middle. Walls, floors, and structural
members were sheared and torn and twisted into shapes impossible to understand or
explain. And, even worse, there were absences. In dozens of volumes, of as many sizes
and of shapes incompatible with any three-dimensional geometry, every solid thing had
simply vanished-vanished without leaving any clue whatever as to how or where it could
possibly have gone.

It took four days to clean the ship of Dekon foam and to treat the hot spots that the
automatics had missed. Four long days of heartbreaking labor in weightlessness and four
too-short nights of sleep in the heavenly-to seven of them, at least-artificial gravity of the
lifecraft. With the hulk deconned to zero (all ruptured radiators had of course been blown
automatically at the time of catastrophe) Jones and Deston went over the engine rooms
item by item.

The subspace drives were fused ruins. Enough normal space gear was in working order,
however, so that they could put on one gravity of drive, which was a vast relief to all.
Then Jones began to jury-rig an astrogation set-up and Deston went to help Adams.

A few evenings later Adams said, "Well, that covers all the preliminary observations I am
equipped to make.

Thanks a lot for your help, Babe, I won't bother you any more for a while."

Deston grinned ruefully. "You'll have to, Doc. I don't mean the routine-clean-up, bodies,
effects, and so on -Lopresto's handling that. You've learned a lot of stuff that none of the
rest of us can make head or tail of. That makes you the director; we're only the cheap