"Blish, James - Mission To The Heart Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

The Malan moved aside while Dr Langer opened the airlock, and then, with cold arrogance, he climbed in ahead of them. Dr Langer waved the cadets in after him.
It was a silent trip to the Argo. The Malan took only a perfunctory look around the gig before settling himself without comment. Neither of the cadets could think of anything disarming to say and Dr Langer offered them no clues.
When they made the transfer, the Malan inspector made straight for the control bubble as though he knew the Argo by heart - as he probably did. Gesturing to the cadets to stay behind him, Dr Langer followed.
It was dark in the bubble, except for some lights on the boards, for Dr Langer had taken every precaution he could think of to make the Argo continue to seem wholly inactivated. But the darkness did not discommode the Malan. He strode to the boards and scanned them.
'Your engines are tuned,' he rumbled, almost at once. He swung back toward them. 'What...'
He broke off. In Dr Langer's right hand was a slender instrument which was pointed squarely between the Malan's eyes.
'Over-confidence,' Dr Langer said in an almost friendly voice, 'is the besetting sin of tyrannies. Lock your hands behind your head, officer.'
The Malan remained motionless. His formidable size, his stony expression, his obvious courage, and the vast pressure of the Heart Stars behind him - all made Dr Langer's gambit seem hopeless indeed.
At last the Malan said, 'That instrument is well known to us. It is harmless. Put it away and explain to me why your engines are tuned.'
'You are vastly mistaken.' With a sudden flick of movement, Dr Langer pointed his instrument at the ceiling where there appeared for an instant a spot of light about the size of a dime. Then the instrument was pointing at the Malan again. 'The weapon is disguised to make it seem what you think it is. Would you like to examine the spot above me where it just struck? While you are doing that, I'll happily cut off your head.'
'You would have done that already if it were possible.'
'Indeed I would have,' Dr Langer said, and suddenly his voice had dropped to a deep, throbbing bass almost as resonant as the Malan's own. 'But I don't want my control room sticky with blood if I can prevent it. Do as I say.'
Slowly, like a man in a nightmare, the Malan officer locked his hands at the back of his neck.
'Jerry, take this gazootavitch from me and keep it aimed at our friend. You're a better shot than I am, anyhow.'
Sandbag edged forward and assumed custody of the slim object, with a grin of pleasure at being given something so obviously deadly. His long familiarity with it would have been obvious to a child, let alone a soldier. The Malan's eyes widened, and he remained frozen while Dr Langer prowled behind him and relieved him of his one weapon, a perfectly obvious sidearm in an equally obvious holster.
'All right. Now, officer, we bear you no malice personally. Nor do we have any place for you here. Would you like to get away - clean?'
'I will report you,' the Malan said.
'No, I don't think so. We'll put you in our gig, which you probably know how to manage, and give you about three minutes to pull clear. Then our ship will go into overdrive -direct Your only chance of survival will be to get as far away from Malis as possible in those three minutes. If I were you, I wouldn't waste a second trying to send any messages.'
Though Jack would have thought it impossible, the granite-coloured Malan turned even greyer.
'What you propose might kill some of my brood-brothers, as well as myself. I am pledged to them. I shall use the three minutes to send warnings, not to escape. I am not so base as to sell my brood for my life.'
There was quite a long silence. At last Dr Langer said, 'You must have been almost human - once. Very well, officer, lie down on the deck.'
'You plan to kill me?'
'No,' Dr Langer said. 'Do as I say. Jack, get a Syrette.'
As the giant carefully stretched himself out on the control room floor, Jack began to understand what Dr Langer now had in mind. He got a Syrette of morphine from the nearest locker and passed it to Dr Langer.
'What if it doesn't work?' he asked hesitantly.
'I don't know. For all I know, it might work too well. But their metabolism is mostly like ours or we couldn't use the same food. Shut up before you betray us.'
The prone giant lifted his head, but at the same instant, Dr Langer stabbed the Syrette through his clothing at the hip and broke it. The Malan tried to lunge to his hands and knees, but the movement was never completed. He buckled and fell, and within less than a minute, he was in coma. Dr Langer knelt beside him and felt for his pulse.
'Perfect. He'll be out for hours, but the drug isn't toxic to him. All right, gentlemen, stuff him in the gig, and shoot him off towards the emptiest star field you can find. By the time he comes to, he'll have all he can manage to do, just figuring out where he is.'
'He's going to be a handful,' Sandbag said. 'But he doesn't really look as big as he did, now that he's snoozing so nicely.'
'He stopped looking so big to me,' Jack said, 'when you scared him with a fountain pen. And he knew what it was all the time. Why did it scare him?'
'Because it isn't a fountain pen,' Dr Langer said, with a sudden chuckle. 'It's a pen-light I'd been using to read the labels on the cases down in the cargo hold, mostly while it was my turn to cook. When he saw me make a spot of light with it, he had to assume that it was a radiation weapon of some kind. And when he saw Jerry handle it with so much confidence, he was convinced. A lot of diplomacy consists in knowing what the other man thinks he knows that's actually dead wrong. Now shovel him out of here, fast, before the Malans send up someone smarter. We don't dare make our last ferry trip - we've got to go.'
A few moments later, the Argo had got away clean and without further incident. There was, of course, the inevitable tectonic shock on Malis, and Jack would have given a good deal to have been able to see just how well those grim rock piles of the rulers of the Heart Stars had withstood it. But that was impossible in the very nature of the situation.
Then they were off and running on full emergency drive. They were as aware as ever that this was not very much better than a crawl compared to the speed possible to even the smallest ships of the Heart Stars' immeasurable armada, but they tried - not very successfully - not to think about it.
They spent four days settling back into ship's routine, expecting every minute to be overhauled and plucked off the Standing Wave as effortlessly as a man might take a floating bottle into a rowboat. But nothing happened. Even Dr Langer could not prevent himself from expressing amazement, and then worry lest the shock wave of their departure might actually have done sufficient damage, after all, to be taken by Malans as a hostile act. Surely it would not have taken them this long to recover from minor damage? Their hopes and their fears gradually became more intense, until Jack surprised himself by wishing momentarily that the Heart Stars would snatch them to get it over with. It was only a flash of irresolution, but it left its mark. Luckily, he had not spoken it aloud.
To distract themselves, they still had the ship's library, but it did riot now seem to be of much help. Even tapes and books that had fascinated Jack on the way in, works of so much substance that he knew he could not exhaust their rewards in three lifetimes, now seemed at worst meaningless and at best simply irrelevant. Sandbag could not settle down at all, and in obvious desperation set himself to trying to write down from memory, word for word and line for line, the entire text of the Aeneid, and was doing surprisingly well at it until the moment when he suddenly put down his stylus, glared at the manuscript before him, and said, 'You know what? I hate Virgil. The stuff is jingly -that's what it is.'
Dr Langer rose to the argument like a fish striking at a bait, a feeling both cadets recognized, surprised though they were to find their leader sharing it.
'That's too strong a word, I think, Jerry,' he said. 'It's mannered, of course, but all decadent poetry is, and it's always seemed to me that Virgil was the master of every possible poetic device that Latin could offer. What's the line that set off this explosion?'
' "Quadrupedante ..." '
'Ah, yes, that must be the second most quoted line in the whole poem. But what's wrong with it?'
'It's all of a piece with the rest of it. These doggone alliterations make my teeth itch.'
'But here it's not alliteration. It's onomatopoeia. He's using the language to imitate the sound of the galloping horses at the same time that he's advancing the story. He overdoes it, of course, very much like Swinburne, but he didn't do it just to show off.'
'Well, all honour to him and all that, but right at the moment he gives me the snits.'
As the days of the Argo's flight lengthened into weeks without the faintest sign of any action from the Hegemony, their uncertainties gradually grew into nightmares. If the Heart Stars were not, after all, pursuing the Argo, then what were they doing? Did they perhaps have some way of strewing the equivalent of mines in Haertel space in advance of the Argo? Or were they playing a cat-and-mouse game? Or had they already launched their police action against the Earth? These and scores of other questions thronged in their minds, but there were no answers to any of them.
'The dolphins!' Jack said suddenly.
'Hmmm?' Dr Langer said.
'I've just thought of another way that they belong in this problem. Maybe it's what you were thinking of, sir. I don't know.'
'Shoot.'
'Well, Dr Langer, it just occurred to me that the whole dolphin culture - the whole whale culture except for the killers - is stable in just the ways that the Heart Stars want a culture to be stable. But all the same, I don't think it'd be possible for the Hegemony to have a race like the dolphins inside it. With all the sea to swim in, the whales are too free for the Hegemony. It's that same unlimited freedom that's made them as stable as they are; they've never had any need to fight among themselves - again with the exception of the killers. And that's not warfare. It's just that some creatures eat other creatures, and the sea's no exception. It's - what did you call it? - it's another kind of equilibrium. And the Hegemony could never tolerate that, either. If the dolphins came to own the water planet, the way Sandbag proposed, the Hegemony would have to exterminate them. They wouldn't be controlled - and couldn't be.'
'Good for you, Jack,' Dr Langer said sombrely. 'That's indeed exactly what I had in mind. As for Jerry's proposal, though, I don't think that this necessarily dooms it. The water planet already has mammalian forms rather like the dolphins, except that they're not sentient. A good many centuries might pass before even the squids, let alone the Hegemony, might realize that the new species is truly intelligent - to say nothing of suspecting that it didn't show up on the planet in the natural course of evolution. After all, it took us about five thousand years to cotton to the fact that the dolphins are every bit as intelligent as man, yet we were both natives of the same planet, and there were clues aplenty strewn around.'
'And they wanted to be friends,' Sandbag added. 'We finally caught on when they talked to Dr Lilly. They wouldn't talk to the decapods, I'll bet.'