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

He put on speed. Now there was occasional debris in the corridor;

here and there, panels in the walls, glimpsed through the smoke,
sagged away from him like sheets of melting wax. None of this
should be happening. There was no reason for wholesale disaster.
But he had no time now to figure out what had gone wrong. The
moans and cries of the arbite passengers still tore at him, but he
plunged on.

A darker, narrower-than-human figure loomed suddenly out
of the smoke before him. A long, oddly boned hand, a three-
fingered hand, caught his bright-orange shipsuit and held him.

"To a lifeshipl" brayed the Albenareth crewman, almost
buzzing the human words. "Turn about. Go forward! Not to the

stern."

Giles checked his instinct to surge against the restraining
hand. He was large and powerful, stronger by far than any arbite,
except those bred and trained to special uses; but he knew better
than to try to pull loose from the apparently skinny fingers holding
him.

"My Honor!" he shouted at the alien, using the first words he
could think of to which an Albenareth mind might respond. "Duty
-my obligation! I'm Steel-Giles Steel Ashad, an Adelman! The
only Adelman aboard heie. Don't you recognize me?"

The alien and he were trapped in a moment of motionless-
ness. The dark, lipless, narrow face stared into his from inches
away. Then the hand of the Albenareth let go and the alien mouth
opened in the dry cackling laughter that meant many things, but
not humor.

"Go!" said the crewman. Giles turned and ran on.

Just a little farther brought him to the door of his suite. The
metal handle burned his fingers and he let go. He kicked the door
with a grunt of effort, and it burst open. Within, the bitter taste of
thick smoke took him solidly by the throat.

He groped his way to his travel bag, jerked it open, and
pulled out the metal box inside it. Coughing, he punched out the
combination, and the lock of the box let go, the lid sprang open.
Hastily he pawed through the mass of papers within. His fingers
closed on the warrant for extradition, crammed it into a suit
pocket, and dipped down to rip open the destruct trigger that
would incinerate the box with all the rest of its contents. A white-
hot flare shot up before him and the metal frame of the container