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

chance of this being a zoo ship. But given a hope of survi-
val, they snatched it, with an imaginative daring few
humans could have matched. Now they sat in plain view,
waiting for the monsters to depart-without wrecking their
ship in mere spitefulness-or for a naval vessel of their own
to rescue them. They had no means of knowing their
captors were not Adderkops, or that this sector would
soon be filled with Adderkop squadrons; the bandits rarely
ventured even this close to Valhalla. Within the limits
of available information, the aliens were acting with com-
plete logic. But the nerve it took!
I wish we could identify them and make friends,
thought Torrance. The Eksers would be damned good
friends for Earth to have. Or Ramanujan, or Freya, or the
entire Polesotechnic League.-With a lopsided grin: I'll
bet they'd be nowhere near as easy to swindle as Old Nick
thinks. They might well swindle him. That I'd love to see!
My reason is more personal, though, .he thought with a
return of bleakness. If we don't clear up this misunder-
standing soon, neither they nor we will be around. I
mean soon. If we have another three or four days of
grace, we're lucky.
The passage opened on a well, with ramps curving down
either side to a pair of automatic doors. One door led to
the engine room, Torrance knew. Behind it, a nuclear
converter powered the ship's electrical system, gravitic
cones, and hyperdrive; the principles on which this was
done were familiar to him, but the actual machines were
enigmas cased in metal and in foreign symbols. He took
the other door, which opened on a workshop. A good
deal of the equipment here was identifiable, however dis-
torted to his eyes: lathe, drill press, oscilloscope, crystal
tester. Much else was mystery. Yamamura sat at an im-
provised workbench, fitting together a piece of electronic
apparatus. Several other devices, haywired on breadboards,
stood close by. His face was shockingly haggard, and his
hands trembled. He'd been working this whole time, with
stimpills to keep him awake.
As Torrance approached, the engineer was talking with
Betancourt, the communications man. The entire crew
of the Hebe G.B. were under Yamamura's direction, in a
frantic attempt to outflank the Eksers by learning on their
own how to operate this ship.
"I've identified the basic electrical arrangement, sir,"
Betancourt was saying. "They don't tap the converter
directly, like us; so evidently they haven't developed
our stepdown methods. Instead, they. use a heat ex-
changer to run an extremely large generator-yeah, the
same thing you guessed was an armature-type dynamo--
and draw A.C. for the ship off that. Where D.C. is needed,