"Anderson, Poul - Question and Answer (Planet of no Return)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)
"I make it my damn business, den." Von Osten stepped forward, hunching his great shoulders; the yellow beard bristled, and the wide battered face was red. "So you are picking on Miguel again?"
"I can handle my own affairs," stated Fernandez flatly. "You and this Puritan crank can stay out of them."
Thornton bit his lip. "I wouldn't talk about cranks," he said, rising to his own feet.
Fernandez got a wild look about him. Everybody knew that his family on the mother's side had spearheaded the Sebastianist Rebellion a century ago; Avery had quietly passed the word along with a warning not to mention it.
"Now, Joab-" The government man hastened toward the Martian, waving his hands in the air. "Now take it easy, gentlemen, please-"
"If all you fuse-blown gruntbrains would mind your own business-" began Gummus-lugil.
"Iss no such t'ing as own business here!" shouted von Osten. "Ve iss all zusammen-togedder, and I vould vish to put you under Patrol discipline-vun day only!"
Trust him to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong moment, thought Lorenzen sickly. His being essentially right only makes it the more insufferable.
"Look-" He opened his mouth, and the stutter that always grabbed him when he was excited made him wordless again.
Gummus-lugil took a stiff-legged step toward the German. "If you want to step outside a minute, we'll settle that," he said.
"Gentlemen!" wailed Avery.
"Are they, now?" asked Thornton.
"Und du kannst auch herausgehen!" bellowed von Osten, turning on him.
"Nobody insults me," snarled Fernandez. His small wiry body gathered itself as if to attack.
"Keep out of this, sonny," said Gummus-lugil. "It's bad enough your starting it."
Fernandez made a noise that was half a sob and jumped for him. The Turk sprang back in surprise. When a fist grazed his cheek, his own leaped out and Fernandez lurched back.
Von Osten yelled and swung at Gummus-lugil. "Give me a hand," gasped Avery. "Get them apart!" He almost dragged Thornton along with him. The Martian got a grip on von Osten's waist and pulled. The German kicked at his ankles. Thornton snapped his lips together over a cry of pain and tried to trip his opponent. Gummus-lugil stood where he was, panting.
"What the devil is going on here?"
They all turned at that shout. Captain Hamilton stood in the doorway.
He was a tall man, solidly built, heavy-featured, thick gray hair above the deep-lined face. He wore the blue undress uniform of the Union Patrol, in which he was a reservist, with mathematical correctness. His normally low voice became a quarterdeck roar, and the gray eyes were like chill iron as they swept the group.
"I thought I heard a quarrel in here-but a brawl!"
They moved away from each other, sullenly, looking at him but not meeting his gaze.
He stood for a very long while, regarding them with a raking contempt. Lorenzen tried to make himself small. But down somewhere inside himself, he wondered how much of that expression was a good job of acting. Hamilton was a bit of a martinet, yes, and he'd had himself psyched as thoroughly as he could be, to rid of all fears and compulsions irrelevant to his work-but he couldn't be that much of a machine. He had children and grandchildren in Canada; he liked gardening; he was not unsympathetic when-
"All of you here have university degrees." The captain was speaking very quietly now. "You're educated men, scientists and technicians. You're the cream of Sol's intellect, I'm told. Well, if you are, God help us all!"
"I suppose you know expeditions like this are dangerous enough at best," went on Hamilton. "I also believe you were told that the first expedition to Troas never got back. To me, it seems reasonable that if we're to survive at all, we have to make a team and work together against whatever it was that killed the first ship. Apparently it does not seem so to you."
He grinned with careful nastiness. "Presumably you scientists also think I'm just the pilot. I'm just a conductor whose only business is to get you to Troas and back. If you believe that, I advise you to read the articles again-assuming you can read. I'm responsible for the safety of the whole ship, including your lives, God help me. That means I'm the boss, too. From the moment you entered the airlock at Earth to the moment you leave it again back at Earth, I'm the boss."
"I don't give one spitball in hell who started this or who did what in which manner to whom. It's enough that there was a fight where there shouldn't have been one. You're all going in the brig for a day-without food. Maybe that'll teach you some manners."
"But I didn't-" whispered Hideki.
"Exactly," snapped Hamilton. "I want every man aboard to have a vested interest in preventing this sort of thing. If your lives, and the lives of everybody else, don't matter to you, maybe your fat-gutted bellies will."
"But I tried-" wailed Avery.
"And failed. A rust-eaten failure if I ever saw one. You get brigged for incompetence, Mr. Avery. It's your job to see that tensions don't build up this way. All right, now-march!"
They marched. Not a word was said.
Somewhat later, Hideki murmured in the darkness of the brig: "It isn't fair. Who does he think he is, God Almighty?"
Lorenzen shrugged, his own easy-going temperament asserting itself, "A captain has to be, I guess."
"But if he keeps this up, everyone will hate him!"
"I imagine he's a pretty good rule-of-thumb psychman himself. Quite probably that's what he wants."
Later, lying in blindness on a hard narrow bunk, Lorenzen wondered what had gone wrong. Avery talked to all the men privately, counseled them, tried to ease their fears and hatreds so that they wouldn't turn on others. At least, he was supposed to. But he hadn't. Incompetent ass! Maybe there was a curse on Lagrange after all.
CHAPTER V
The sky was incredible.
Here in the center of the great cluster, the double star was a double blaze. Lagrange I seemed as bright as Sol, though only half the apparent size, a blue-green flame ringed with eerie halos of corona and zodiacal light. When the glare was filtered out, you could see monstrous prominences on its rim. Lagrange II, a third of Sol's angular diameter but almost as luminous, was a rich orange-red, like a huge coal flung into heaven. When both their lights streamed through the viewports into a darkened room, men's faces had an unearthly color; they seemed themselves transfigured.
The stars were so brilliant that some of them could be seen even through that haze of radiance. When you looked out from the shadow side of the ship, the sky was a hard crystal black spattered with stars-great unwinking diamonds, flashing and flashing, confused myriads, a throng of them glittering in a glory such as Earth's dwellers had never seen. It was lonely to think that their light, which Earth now saw, had left when man was still huddled in caves; that the light now streaming from them would be seen in an unthinkable future when there might be no more men on Earth.
The Hudson had taken an orbit about Troas, some 4,000 kilometers out. The companion, Ilium, looked almost four times as big as Luna seen from Earth; the limb was blurred by the thin atmosphere, and the harsh glare of dead seabottoms mottled the bluish face. A small world, old before its time, no place to colonize; but it would be a rich near-by source of minerals for men on Troas.
That planet hung enormous in the viewports, filling nearly half the sky. You could see the air about it, clouds and storms, day and night. The ice-caps covering a third of its face were blinding white, the restless wind-whipped oceans were a blueness which focused the light of one sun to a cruel point. There were islands and one major continent, its north and south ends buried under the ice, spreading easterly and westerly halfway round the planet. It was green about the equator, hazing into darker green and brown toward the poles. Lakes and rivers were like silver threads across it. A high mountain range, rugged sweep of light and shadow, ran down either coast.
The half-dozen men in the ship's observatory hung in weightless silence. The mingled light of the suns gleamed off the metal of their instruments. They were supposed to compare notes on their several observations, but for a while they didn't want to speak; this was too awesome.
"Well?" Hamilton barked it out at last. "What have you found?"
"Essentially-" Lorenzen gulped. The anti-space sickness pills helped some, but he still felt weak, he longed for weight and clean air. "Essentially, we've confirmed what the Hercules expedition noted. Mass of the planets, distance, atmosphere, temperature-and yes, the green down there definitely has the absorption spectrum of chlorophyll."
"Any sign of life?"
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |