"Charles L. Harness-Stalemate in Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

Life was good, life was beautiful. She almost yawned. Most certainly all of the columns had been
pulled out, and then four had been replaced and something had broken down with the fifth. But they had
all been out, and that was the only thing that mattered.
"What happened, Gorph?" asked Perat, sipping at his terif again. His eyes were fastened on his
mistress.
She knew that he had pulled the safety catch on the Faeg.
"When the crew took the rods out, the prime mover broke down on the fifth one, when it was only
half-way out. They brought in another mover and got the other four rods back in, and now they're trying
to repair the first mover and push the fifth rod back."
(The fifth rod had not been completely drawn. Oh Almighty Heaven!)
"Very well, Gorph. I need not repeat that none of the rods are to be moved out again, unless I appear
to you personally. I'll talk to you later."
The box went dead.
Perat, now taking no notice of Evelyn, finished his terif leisurely. She sat at his side, breathing
woodenly. She had done all that she could do. All five rods had not been withdrawn, and they never
would be, now.
"If all Terran women are like you," he began slowly, "I cannot understand how you Terrans lost this
battle." He did not expect an answer, and did not wait for one. His hard eyes seemed softened somewhat
by a curious admiration. "Only your own gods know what you have endured in your attempt to start the
pile."
She looked up wretchedly.
He went on: "Yes, we learned in the nick of time, didn't we? Our physicists told Gorph that the great
rods were the core of a pile that could have converted both ships into pure energy, with not a shred of
matter left over-- something that all the fission piles in the two galaxies couldn't do. It seems that the pile,
if activated, would have introduced sufficient energy into the low-packing-fraction atoms, from iron on
down to helium, to transform them completely from matter into radiation.
"Unpleasant thought! Now the Scythian plan will be modified slightly. We shall wait until we tear our
globe away from yours, far away, and then prime movers left behind in your ship here can pull the
columns again, all five, this time. Our globe then proceeds into the Terran Confederacy, and the war will
be over. But of course, you'll know nothing about that."
He regarded her wearily. "I'm sorry, Lyn-- or is it 'Evelyn Kane'?" If you had been of Tharn-blood, or
even of the Scythian federacy, I would have married you."
She listened to him with only half a mind. Some strange, inaudible thing was trying to reach her.
Something she couldn't grasp, but ought to grasp. What had the mentors told her to be ready for?
Exhaustion lay like a paralyzing blanket over her inert mind.
"You killed your countryman that day," he intoned, "just to ingratiate yourself with me. He was very
generous to you. When he saw that you wouldn't shoot him with his eyes open, he closed them. Who
was he?"
"Gordon, Lord Kane. My father."
The terif glass shook, and the man's face became perceptibly paler. He breathed stridently for a while
before speaking again.
This time he seemed to be calling with earnest finality to the forbidding deity of his own warlike
homeland, announcing a newcomer at the dark portals of the god: "This woman... !"
***


Evelyn Kane did not shriek when the Faeg-bolt tore through her rib and lungs. Even when she sank to
the floor, the pain-lines in her own face were much better controlled than those in Perat's.
Then as she lay quietly on the thick, gilded carpet, with consciousness rapidly fading and returning with
the regularity of her heart beats, she realized what had been calling to her. The piezo crystal in her waist