"Anderson, Poul - 1964 Nicholas Van Rijn 02 - Trader to the Stars 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

The girl started to spe~ took a closer look at the captain's
face, and clamped her teeth together.
"Well?" snapped the merchant peevishly.
Torrance cleared his throat. His voice sounded unfamil-
iar and faraway to him. "I think you'd better come have
a look, sir."
"You found the crew, wherever the sputtering hell they
holed up? What are they like? What kind of ship is this
we've gotten us, ha?"
Torrance chose to answer the last question first. "It
seems to be an interstellar animal collector's transport
vessel. The main hold is full of cages-environmentally
controlled compartments, I should say-with the damned-
est assortment of creatures I've ever seen outside Luna
City Zoo."
"So what the pox is that to me? Where is the collector
himself, and his fig-plucking friends?"
"Well, sir." Torrance gulped. "We're pretty sure by now,
they're hiding from us. Among all the other animals."
A tube was run between the yacht's main lock and the
entry cut into the other ship. Through this, air was
pumped and electric lines were strung, to illuminate
the prize. By some fancy juggling with the gravitic gen-
erator of the Hebe G.B., Yamamura supplied about one-
fourth Earth-weight to the foreigner, though he couldn't
get the direction uniform and its decks felt canted in
wildly varying degrees.
Even under such conditions, Van Rijn walked ponder-
ously. He stood with a salami in one hand and a raw
onion in the other, glaring around the captured bridge.
It could only be that, though it was in the bows rather
then the waist. The viewscreens were still in operation:
smaller than human eyes found comfortable, but reveal-
ing the same pattern of stars, surely by the same kind of
optical compensators. A control console made a semicircle
at the forward bulkhead, too big for a solitary human to
operate. Yet presumably the designer had only had one
pilot in mind, for a single seat had been placed in the mid-
dle of the arc.
Had been. A short metal post rose from the deck. Simi-
lar structures stood at other points, and boltholes showed
where chairs were once fastened to them. But the seats
had been removed.
"Pilot sat there at the center, I'd guess, when they
weren't simply running on automatic," Torrance haz-
arded. "Navigator and communications officer. . . here
and here? I'm not sure. Anyhow, they probably didn't use
a copilot, but that chair bollard at the after end of the
room suggests that an extra officer sat in reserve, ready to
take over." .