"Philip E. High - The Prodigal Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (High Phillip E)

with a people several thousand years ahead in culture and technology.

It was this technical superiority which had prevented both races from
seizing the Mattrain worlds for their own advantage. Both were acutely
aware that the Mattrain could have beaten both races to their knees in a
matter of days.

Again there were rumorsтАж No one quite knew where these rumors
originated but put together they spelled out something unpleasant. It was
said that the Mattrain had something. No one knew quite what it was but,
boiled down, attacking the Mattrain was suicide for anyone.

There were a million guesses as to what this something was but no one
had put forward anything definite. Only one man might know, only one
man might have the answer. The man who had sat out the entire war on
those neutral Mattrain planetsтАФa man called Peter Duncan.

The Mattrain ship, when it finally arrived, was so small it was almost an
insult. Here was no dignity, no ceremony, no sense of the appropriate.

The cruiser commanders had the uneasy feeling they were being
laughed at. The Mattrain pilot was probably making mocking and slightly
vulgar signs with his fingers. All this pointed show of force and they'd sent
that, a tiny bronze-colored cube no bigger than a ground car.

They would have liked to have done something about it. They would
have liked to have shown this cock-a-hoop flea cage just what they felt
about it. Their resentment was made worse by chagrined realization that
this same flea cage could probably beat hell out of the lot of them.

The Mattrain ship touched the side of the transfer vessel, hung there
briefly then drifted away. Watchers saw it boost suddenly to a killing
gravity, exhale sudden brightness and flick abruptly into hyper-drive.

Transfer was over.

The transfer ship was beaming vision and sound but viewers on Earth
caught only a brief glimpse of a fair-haired smiling man emerging from
the transit lock. He was lost almost immediately in a grim reception
committee of white coated and be-masked medics. They hustled him
quickly away and the white doors of the medical laboratories slid shut in
front of the tele-mikes.

Viewers had a long wait; medical science was taking no chances.

The experts began on the assumption that he was non-human and
worked backwards. Fortunately they had his natal charts but it made
them no less thorough. They checked his blood, respiration, retina
pattern, finger prints and his sexual organs. They measured, weighed and
analyzed the contents of his bowels, stomach and bladder. They ran off