"Gordon R. Dickson - Hilifter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

could never have entered. But the cabin's single occupant was asleep on
the right-hand seat of the two seats that an upraised bed left exposed. The
occupant was a small girl of about eight years old.
The slim golden barrel of the handgun had swung immediately to aim at
the child's temple. For an automatic second, it hung poised there, Cully's
finger half-pressing the trigger. But the little girl never stirred. In the silence,
Cully heard the surge of his own blood in his ears and the faint crackle of
the note in his shirt pocket. He lowered the gun and fumbled in the
waistband of his pants, coming up with a child-sized anesthetic pellet. He
slipped this into his gun above the regular load, aimed the gun, and fired.
The child made a little uneasy movement all at once and then lay still. Cully
bent over her for a second, and heard the soft sound of her breathing. He
straightened up. The pellet worked not through the blood stream, but
immediately through a reaction of the nerves. In fifteen minutes the effect
would be worn off, and the girl's sleep would be natural slumber again.


He turned away, stepped up on the opposite seat, and laid his free hand
on the latch handle of the emergency hatch overhead. A murmur of voices
from above made him hesitate. He unscrewed the barrel of the handgun
and put it in his ear with the other hollow end resting against the ceiling
which was also the floor overhead. The voices came, faint and distorted,
but understandable to his listening.
". . . hilifter," a female voice was saying.
"Oh, Patty!" another female voice answered. "He was just trying to scare
you. You believe everything."
"How about that ship that got hilifted just six months ago? That ship going
to one of the Pleiades, just like this one? The Queen of Argyle тАУ"
"Princess of Argyle."
"Well, you know what I mean. Ships do get hilifted. Just as long as
there're governments on the pioneer worlds that'll license them and no
questions asked. And it could just as well happen to this ship. But you don't
worry about it a bit."
"No, I don't."
"When hilifters take over a ship, they kill off everyone who can testify
against them. None of the passengers or ship's officers from the Princess
of Argyle was ever heard of again."
"Says who?"
"Oh, everybody knows that!"
Cully took the barrel from his ear and screwed it back onto his weapon.
He glanced at the anesthetized child and thought of trying the other cabin
with an emergency hatch. But the maneuver period would not last more than
twenty minutes at the most and five of that must be gone already. He put
the handgun between his teeth, jerked the latch to the overhead hatch, and
pulled it down and open.
He put both hands on the edge of the hatch opening and with one spring
went upward into the salon cabin overhead.
He erupted into the open space between a pair of facing seats, each of
which held a girl in her twenties. The one on his left was a rather plump,
short, blond girl who was sitting curled up on her particular seat with a towel