"Harry Harrison - 50 in 50 - Fifty Stories in Fifty Years" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

50 in 50:
Fifty Stories in Fifty Years
Harry Harrison


V2.0 тАУ fixed garbled text, formatting, broken paragraphs; by peragwinn




Alien Shores

The Streets of Ashkelon
Somewhere above, hidden by the eternal clouds of Wesker's World, a thunder rumbled and grew.
Trader Garth stopped suddenly when he heard it, his boots sinking slowly into the muck, and cupped his
good ear to catch the sound. It swelled and waned in the thick atmosphere, growing louder.
"That noise is the same as the noise of your sky-ship," Itin said, with stolid Wesker logicality, slowly
pulverizing the idea in his mind and turning over the bits one by one for closer examination. "But your ship
is still sitting where you landed it. It must be, even though we cannot see it, because you are the only one
who can operate it. And even if anyone else could operate it we would have heard it rising into the sky.
Since we did not, and if this sound is a sky-ship sound, then it must meanтАФ"
"Yes, another ship," Garth said, too absorbed in his own thoughts to wait for the laborious
Weskerian chains of logic to clank their way through to the end. Of course it was another spacer, it had
been only a matter of time before one appeared, and undoubtedly this one was homing on the S.S radar
reflector as he had done. His own ship would show up clearly on the newcomer's screen and they would
probably set down as close to it as they could.
"You better go ahead, Itin," he said. "Use the water so you can get to the village quickly. Tell
everyone to get back into the swamps, well clear of the hard ground. That ship is landing on instruments
and anyone underneath at touchdown is going to be cooked."
This immediate threat was clear enough to the little Wesker amphibian. Before Garth had finished
speaking Itin's ribbed ears had folded like a bat's wings and he slipped silently into the nearby canal.
Garth squelched on through the mud, making as good time as be could over the clinging surface. He had
just reached the fringes of the village clearing when the rumbling grew to a head-splitting roar and the
spacer broke through the low-hanging layer of clouds above. Garth shielded his eyes from the
down-reaching tongue of flame and examined the growing form of the gray-black ship with mixed
feelings.
After almost a standard year on Wesker's World he had to fight down a longing for human
companionship of any kind. While this buried fragment of herd-spirit chattered for the rest of the monkey
tribe, his trader's mind was busily drawing a line under a column of figures and adding up the total. This
could very well be another trader's ship, and if it was his monopoly of the Wesker's trade was at an end.
Then again, this might not be a trader at all, which was the reason he stayed in the shelter of the giant fern
and loosened his gun in its holster. The ship baked dry a hundred square meters of mud, the roaring blast
died, and the landing feet crunched down through the crackling crust. Metal creaked and settled into
place while the cloud of smoke and steam slowly drifted lower in the humid air.
"GarthтАФyou native-cheating extortionistтАФwhere are you?" the ship's speaker boomed. The lines of
the spacer had looked only slightly familiar, but there was no mistaking the rasping tones of that voice.
Garth had a twisted smile when he stepped out into the open and whistled shrilly through two fingers. A
directional microphone ground out of its casing on the ship's fin and turned in his direction.
"What are you doing here, Singh?" he shouted towards the mike. "Too crooked to find a planet of
your own and have to come here to steal an honest trader's profits?"