"Harry Harrison - Bill 2 - On The Planet Of Robot Slaves" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

eye, he stood at his post on the bridge and glared at Admiral Praktis.
"You just can't tramp into my ship without a word, weld that great ugly
machine to my control console, take command where you are not wanted..."
"Shut up," Praktis implied. "You will do as you are ordered." Admiral
Lubyanka snarled agreement as he pulled his head out of the depths of the
machine in question. "And don't you ever forget that, Bly. You take orders
from him. You can fly this junker-but Praktis is in command. The electronic
tracker is tracking electronically, which is what this entire damn operation
is about. My technician here, Megahertz Mate 2nd Class Cy BerPunk, will follow
the escaping ship. He'll give you your course. Your assignment, should you
decide to take it, and you have no choice, is to track those damned dragons
back to28their nest-then report the location to me here. Ready, BerPunk?"
The technician soldered one last connection and nodded, his coarse black hair
swinging freely over the white pocked skin of his forehead, brushing the black
glasses that concealed his eyes. "On line. Systemsgo." he said coarsely. "RAM
is ramming, electrons zinging. All systems go-or already gone." "And about
time too, Lubyanka snarled, then stabbed Praktis in the chest with a sharp
finger. "Do this job, Praktis, and do it well-or it's your ass." "It's
already my ass so I have nothing to lose. Heave anchor, Lubyanka, or you will
blast off with us to the big garbage dump in the sky. Is the ship secured for
takeoff, Captain Bly?" Bly treated him to a look of withering contempt and
cracked his knuckles. "Good," Praktis said. "I see that we are going to
get along real nice." Bill had to step aside, or rather stagger aside
since he wasn't that sober yet, when Admiral Lubyanka made his exit. Captain
Bly watched until the spacelock indicator changed from red to green, then
thumbed the takeoff warning. The alarm sounded through the ship like a
gargantuan eructation and the crew hurried to buckle in. Bill dropped into a
vacant seat and pulled the straps tight just as Captian Bly switched on full
power. Gravity sat on their chests with the 11G takeoff: Except for Bill who
had a rat sitting on his chest as well as gravity, for it had been hurled from
the pipes in the ceiling by the blast. It glared at Bill with gleaming red
eyes, its lips pulled back by the drag of takeof blast to expose its long,
yellow incisors. Bill glared back, eyes equally red, his yellow fangs equally
exposed. Neither could27move and they glared in futile hatred until the
engines cut out. Bill grabbed for the rat but it leaped to safety and ran out
the door. "We're in orbit," Captain Bly said "What's our course?"
"It's coming, man, coming..." Cy muttered, stabbing buttons and adjusting
switches. He sneered at the VDU which was filled with sparkling confetti, then
tapped it with a long and dirty fingernail. The image cleared and the trace
was clear. "Time needed. Working it out now. This little old 80286 CPU has
got a math coprocessor so it should rustle through the computations like
crazy..." "Shut up," Praktis snarled as he looked around the cabin. Wurber
was just starting down the ladder. "You, stop!" he commanded. "Ahh gotta
go to the toilet," he whimpered. "Your business after my business-and my
business is a cold beer. Fetch." "Got it!" Cy crowed. "Course is right
ascension seventy-one degrees, six minutes and seventeen seconds, declination
twelve degrees exactly. Hack." The gyros whined as the garbage tug turned
to her new course. Lights flickered and changed on the console under the
skilled, if trembling, fingers of her commander. "Don't unbelt yet," he
warned. "The FTL drive, so recently installed, is an experimental model. And