"Edmond Hamilton - Fugitives of the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

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 THE TWO THOUSAND CENTURIES:
[The Era of the FederationтАФ62,339-129,999]
FUGITIVES OF THE STARS
By
EDMOND HAMILTON
ISBN 978-1-60089-016-1
All rights reserved
Copyright ┬й 1965, renewed Estate of Edmond Hamilton
Reprinted by permission Spectrum Literary Agency
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.
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 CHAPTER I
TO FALL with a soundless scream through an empty chaos of contending forces,
to be riven right out of your own dimensions and hurled quaking through alien
continua ... that was how it was, if you looked at it one way.
But not, thought Horne, if you looked at it his way. It was a voyage through
enchanted isles on the shores of the universe, through the great lamps of foreign
suns, where pale planets rose up in colored sunlight like mysterious new Hesperides,
and dropped behind you, and you went on and on, mystery into mystery.
"The trouble with me,тАЭ he thought wryly, тАЬis that I've still got a little of the romantic
fourteen-year-old in me."
He was a long way from being a boy in a Connecticut city who had dreamed of
stars. Eighteen years of time and a hundred-odd light-years of space. A long way,
but he still got a bit of the old thrill when he looked out ahead through the pilot room
windows. And this was nice, not only for his own sake but because he could share
the thrill with Vinson, the young Second Pilot, who was making his first trip out here.
Vinson spent most of his time staring out the windows as though he wanted to
absorb into himself, everything that he saw, so that he might keep it forever,
unchanged.
The windows were not really windows. In a ship going many times faster than light
by cross-cutting through dimensions, all you would see was a twisted blur. A ship's
eyes were radar instruments of fantastic speed and scope, but human and
near-human people had their psychological limitations, and it had been found that
pilots functioned better when they could see with their physical eyes a summation of
radar's information presented on window-like screens.
Horne looked out at beauty and danger. This was the Fringe, where not many
star-ships ever went. These swarms of high-piled suns, smoky red and pallid green,
cruel white and warm, beckoning orange, lured and glittered like fabled islands. But
they could lure to destruction. There were very few radar beacons or navigation aids
out here, for this was far outside the vast network of the Federation. This was the
coast of the galaxy, and if you went much farther you found yourself out in the black
emptiness that-ran all the way to Andromeda.
Horne said to Denman, the third man in the pilot room, тАЬFive, six times I've piloted
through the Fringe, and I've never seen anything of all these wild worlds, but a few