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

The chief engineer turned a patient brown face to him.
"I've got the rest of the crew examining the ship in detail,
sir," he said. "I'll join them as soon as I've gotten Freelady
Kofoed trained at this particular job. She can handle the
routine of it while the rest of us use our special skills to
. . ." His words trailed off. He grinned ruefully. "To poke
and prod gizmos we can't possibly understand in less than
a month of work, with our limited research tools."
"A month we have not got," said Van Rijn. "You aro"
here checking conditions inside each individual cage?"
"Yes, sir. They're meteroo, of course, but we can't
read the meters, so we have to do the job ourselves. I've
haywired this stuff together, to give an approximate value
of gravity, atmospheric pressure and composition, temper-
ature, illumination spectrum, and so forth. It's slow work,
mostly because of all the arithmetic needed to turn the
dial readings into such data. Luckily, we don't have to test
every cubicle, or even most of them."
"No," said Van Rijn. "Even to a union organizer, ob-
vious this ship was never made by fishes or birds. In fact,
some kind of hands is always necessary."
"Or tentacles." Yamamura nodded at the compartment
before him. The light within was dim red. Several black
creatures could be seen walking restlessly about. They had
stumpy-Iegged quadrupedal bodies, from which torsos
rose, centaur-fashion, toward heads armored in some bony
material. Below the faceless heads were six thick, ropy
arms, set in triplets. Two of these ended in three boneless
but probably strong finger.
"I suspect these are our coy friends," said Yamamura.
"If so, we'll have a deuce of a time. They breathe hydro-
gen under high pressure and triple gravity, at a temper-
ature of seventy below."
"Are they the only ones who like that kind of weather,
asked Torrance.
Yamamura gave him a sharp look. "I see what you're
getting at, skipper. No, they aren't. In the course of put-
ting this apparatus together and testing it, I've already
found three other cubicles where conditions are similar.
And in those, the animals are obviously just animals:
snakes and so on, which couldn't possibly have built this
ship.
"But then these octopus-horses can't be the crew, can
they?" asked Jeri timidly. "I mean, if the crew were col-
lecting animals from other planets, they wouldn't take
home animals along, would they?"
"They might," said Van Rijn. "We have a cat and a
couple parrots aboard the Hebe G.B., nie? Or, there are
many planets with very similar conditions of the hydro-
gen sort, just like Earth and Freya are much-alike oxygen