"Edmond Hamilton - Battle for the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

"I am thinking that it was not my lucky day when you picked the Starsong for your flagship. That's all."

The ship moved onward through the fiery channel, toward the pair of red binary stars that marked its
end. The binaries hardly seemed to change size, the swarm of stars on either side of them seemed to
creep back with infinite slowness, even though the ship moved at very many times the speed of light.
Once, thought Birrel, such velocities had been thought flatly impossible. Then the light-speed barrier had
been cracked by the ultradrive which altered the basic mass-speed ratio by bleeding off mass as energy
and storing it, then automatically reconverting it into mass when a ship decelerated. At such velocities,
Birrel felt that it was ridiculous for him to be chafing at their slowness. He always felt that, and he always
chafed.

Looking at the upper screen that showed the flaring, billowing belly of the nebula above them, like the
underside of a burning ocean, Birrel said to Garstang, тАЬDoes it seem to you that the pace is speeding up?
I mean, this jockeying for power between the Sectors has gone on a long time, ever since Earth lost real
authority. But it seems different lately, somehow. More incidents, more feeling of something driving ahead
toward a definite goal, a plan and a pattern you can't quite see. You know what I mean?"

Garstang nodded. тАЬI know."

The computer banks back in the calc-room clicked and chattered. Relays kicked, compensating course,
compensating tides of gravitic force quite capable of breaking a ship apart like a piece of flawed glass.
The two red binaries gave them a final glare of malice and were gone. They were out of the channel.

A star the color of a peacock's breast lay dead ahead.

Venner, the anxious and alert young officer who stood not far from Garstang, said, тАЬThat's the nearest
star with E-type worlds, sir. We've plotted five others farther in."

Garstang looked at Birrel.

Birrel shrugged. тАЬIf they're based in here, it'd be on an E-type. Take them one by one."

Garstang gave his orders. Birrel watched the blaze of peacock-blue grow swiftly. No ambush in the
channel, so now what? Ambush on the world of the blue star? Or nothing? Time and money wasted and
maybe it was all just a feint on SolleremosтАЩ part, trying to draw the Fifth here while a move was made
somewhere else.

Suddenly Birrel felt old and tired. He had been in the squadron for almost twenty years, ever since he
was seventeen, and in all these years the great game of stars, the strain, the worry, had never let up.

It must have been nice in a way, Birrel thought, in the old days a couple of centuries ago when the United
Worlds still governed in fact from Earth, and all the star-squadrons were part of one galactic fleet whose
struggles were only with the natural perils of the galaxy itself. But that had not lasted long.

The trouble was that it had got too big, too fast. It should have taken millennia to expand so widely. But
the fact that on scores of E-type starworlds they had found peoples completely human in every respect,
had upset all calculations. The anthropologists were still arguing whether that was because original
germinal spores of life, seeding worlds of similar type, had produced identical chains of evolution, or
whether there had been a long-ago spread of some human stock through all these worlds. Opinion
inclined to the latter theory, but it didn't really matter. What mattered was that finding all these