"Edmond Hamilton - Captain Future 27 - Birthplace of Creation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

the four who lived here were not here now,
that they were far away on a distant
troubled world. But their formidable name
and presence seemed to haunt this lifeless
sphere and he was walking now into the
teeth of the deadly defenses they had left
behind them.
"They can be beaten," he told himself,
sweating. "I've got to beat them."
He studied his map again. He knew
exactly how far he had come from the ship.
Leaving himself a wide margin of safety he
activated the detector-mechanism on the
sledge. The helmet of his pressure-suit was
fitted with ultra-sensitive hearing devices
that had nothing to do with sonic waves
but translated sub-electronic impulses from
the detector into audible sound-signals.
He stood still, listening intently. But the
detector said nothing and he went on, very
slowly now and cautiously, across the dead
waste until his footsteps in the dust
approached the line of that outer circle on
the map. Then the detector spoke with a
faint small clicking.
Garrand stopped. He bent over the panel
of the mechanism, a jumble of dials,
sorters, frequency-indicators and pattern-
indicators. Above them a red pip burned in
a ground-glass field. His heart hammered
hard and he reached hastily for a black
oblong bulk beside the detector.
He thought, "I'm still far enough away
so that the blast won't be lethal if this
doesn't work."
The thought was comforting but
unconvincing. He forced his hand to
steady, to pick up the four-pronged plugs
and insert them, one by one in the proper
order, into the side of the detector. Then he
dropped behind the sledge and waited.
The black oblong hummed. He could
feel it humming where his shoulder
touched the metal of the sledge. It was
designed to pick up its readings from the
detector, to formulate them, adjust itself
automatically to the indicated pattern and
frequency, to broadcast an electronic
barrier that would blank out the impulse-
receptivity of the hidden trap's sensor-unit.