"Bindlestiff - James Blish V1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

Bindlestiff

By James Blish



It was inevitable that, occasionally, one of the cruising cities of space would turn criminal.

And they made vicious, deadly enemies!



I.

EVEN to the men of the flying city, the Rift was awesome beyond all human experience. Loneliness was natural between the stars, and starmen were used to it-the stardensity of the average cluster was more than enough to give a veteran Okie claustrophobia; but the enormous empty loneliness of the Rift was unique.

To the best of Mayor Amalfi's knowledge, no Okie city had ever crossed the Rift before. The City Fathers, who knew everything, agreed. Amalfi was none too sure that it was wise, for once, to be a pioneer.

Ahead and behind, the walls of the Rift shimmered, a haze of stars too far away to resolve into individual points of light. The walls curved gently toward a starry floor, so many parsecs
"beneath" the keel of the city that it seemed to be hidden in a rising haze of star dust.

"Above," there was nothing; a nothing as final as the slamming of a door-it was the intergalactic gap.

The Rift was, in effect, a valley cut in the face of the galaxy. A few stars swam in it, light-millennia apart-stars which the tide of human colonization could never have reached. Only on the far side was there likely to be any inhabited planet, and, consequently, work for a migratory city.

On the near side there were the Earth police. They would not chase Amalfi's city across the Rift; they were busy consolidating their conquests of Utopia and the Duchy of Gort, barbarian planets whose ties with Earth were being forcibly reestablished. But they would be happy to see the city turn back
-there was a violation of a Vacate order still on the books, and a little matter of a trick- Soberly, Amalfi contemplated the oppressive chasm which
the screens showed him. The picture came in by ultrawave from a string of proxy-robots, the leader of which was already parsecs out across the gap. And still the far wall was featureless, just beginning to show a faintly granular texture which gave promise of resolution into individual stars at top magnification.

"I hope the food holds out," he muttered. "I never expected the cops to chase us this far."

Beside him, Mark Hazieton, the city manager, drummed delicately upon the arm of his chair. "No reason why it shouldn't," he said lazily. "Of course the oil's low, but the Chiorella crop is flourishing. And I doubt that we'll be troubled by mutation in the tanks. Aren't ultronic nexi supposed to vary directly with star-density?"

"Sure," Amalfi said, irritated. "We won't starve if everything goes right. If we hadn't been rich enough to risk crossing, I'd of let us be captured and paid the fine instead. But we've never been as long as a year without planet-fall before, and this crossing is going to take all of the four years the Fathers predicted. The slightest accident, and we'll be beyond help."

"There'll be no accident," Hazleton said confidently.

"There's fuel decomposition-we've never had a flash-fire
but there's always a first time. And if the Twenty-third Street spindizzy conks out again-"

He stopped abruptly. Through the corner~ of his eye, a minute pinprick of brightness poked insistently into his brain. When he looked directly at the screen, it was still there. He pointed.

"Look-is that a cluster? No, it's too small. If that's a freefloating star, it's close."

He snatched up a phone. "Give me Astronomy. Hello, Jake. Can you figure me the distance of a star from the source of an ultraphone broadcast?"

"Why, yes," the phone said. "Wait, and I'll pick up your image. Ah-I see what you mean; something at 10:00 o'clock center, can't tell what yet. Dinwiddie pickups on your proxies? Intensity will tell the tale." The astronomer chuckled like a parrot on the rim of a cracker barrel. "Now if you'll just tell me how many proxies you have, and how far they-"

"Five. Full interval."