"Leinster, Murray - Plague" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)
УTheyТvТ~. . . never seen the germ, Ben. Not even the electron microscope shows anything. Just. . . the women dieЧФ
УBut youТre not going to!Ф said Ben fiercely. СWhy couldnТt I be a doctor or something useful!Ф
УYou, can be. .. comforting,Ф said Sally bravely. УI. . . gave my whole life to you when I ran to you, Ben. There arenТt but a few days, instead of . . . of years, butЧФ
He bent over her groaning. The clatter of the Geiger counter stopped abruptly. It had touched her arm. She shivered a little.
УBroken, I guess. But it was ticking my life away. LetТs forget it.Ф
Ben ground his teeth. He moved to thrust the instrument out of his way. It clattered briefly, and stopped again. It dangled from his hand by the cord to its electric connections. It clattered, and stopped, and clattered again. Ben stared down at it. It was not pointing at Sally. He swung it about. It clattered steadily when pointed at the instrument panel. It was mute when it pointed at Sally. It was mute when it pointed at anything else but the instrument panel. No. It was mute when it did not point to the GC phone. No. It clattered only when it pointed to the course-computerЧ It clattered onlyЧ УWait a minute!Ф said Ben harshly. УThereТs something funny here!Ф
He turned out the lights again. The instrument dials glowed as before. Sally did not! But there was a whitish luminosity at the top of the pilotТs chair. It seemed spread along the metal frame. It was not phosphorescence. It was white, not bluish. Ben moved toward it. The Geiger counter chattered when Ben pointed it at the luminosity. Then, abruptly, the luminosity was not on the chair. A dial glowed whitely, as if a stronger light were behind it. The Geiger counter clattered when pointed at that dial. Ben swung the counter upon Sally. It was mute.
УListen!Ф said Ben in a strained voice. УYou say women with the plague give off cosmics. YouТre not giving them off, so you havenТt it. But you did, so you did have it. My pilotТs chair was giving off cosmics. Did it have the plague? Now the gravitometer is giving off cosmics. Has it got the plague?
Sally drew in her breath quickly. There was silence in the cabin of the little sports cruiser of the void. The only sound anywhere was a tiny humming. That was the converter, turning BenТs Reserve bracelet and
the refuse of his last meal into powerЧefficiency 99.9999. . . 9 percentЧ to drive the little craft with an insanely mounting velocity away from its last known position.
The whitish glow reappeared suddenly. It was in the metal rim about the control ceiling light. It vanished, and reappeared on the handle of a metal door. It vanished yet againЧ УThe strange life-forms of Lore,Ф said Ben, his voice rough in the darkness. УThe Bazin Expedition didnТt want to go back to Pharona. It said its return would be dangerous until it understood those life-forms. It was forced to go back, and it carried the plague. At a guess, this is one of the life-forms of Lore. It seems to stick to metal. It didnТt move into the glass of the ceiling light, but stayed on the metal rim which holds it.Ф
He swung the Geiger counter. Carefully. It clattered.
УItТs somewhere in the stern. Engine room, most likelyЧФ
Sally said unsteadily: УI . . . havenТt got the plague, thenЧФ
УNo, you havenТt got it.Ф BenТs voice softened. УYouТre dead officially, my dear, but now it looks like youТre going to stay actually alive for a long time. WeТd better do some planning for ourselves. At the moment, IТm going to change course. WeТve got all the Fleet in this part of space hunting us right now. I was talking to Headquarters when you yelledЧ and weТve got to hide. And I donТt know for how long.Ф
Sally said slowly, as if incredulous of hope: УI. . . donТt care. IТve gotten you into terrible trouble. The least I can do is.. . anything you tell me to.Ф
He put his hand lightly on her shoulder.
УThereТs a meteor-stream,Ф he said. УWhat we want is time and peace in which to make our plans. IТll dive into that stream and match up with it. WeТll be one of several million small objects heading out to aphelion in the track of a comet nobodyТs ever seen. With our drive off and a little care, thereТs no faintest danger that weТll ever be picked up. IТve supplies for a long enough time. WeТll be beyond the outermost planets before we put the drive on again, and then weТll start for . . . where shall we go, Sally? Sirius? Ri-gel? IТve heard there are some new colonies out beyond Rigel where things are rough and tough and the brass hats havenТt yet been able to sit back with their tummies sticking out with dignity to regulate everything to justify their feeling of importance.Ф
He moved to the pilotТs seat, not bothering to turn on the lights again. He swung the little ship about. The converter was still working on the bracelet he had shoved into the feed. It was crushed and being extruded into the converter-chamber as an infinitesimally fine wire. The efficiency of the converter and the drive was high. In theory, with one hundred percent efficiency, the mass of fuel needed to give a spacecraft a given velocity in empty space is the mass the spaceship will gain because of that velocity. In practice, of course, much more is needed. To attain a speed of a hundred miles a second from rest, in space, the fuel consumption is actually about a milligram of disintegrated matter per ton mass of the ship. In anything like a sports cruiser, the fuel for merely interplane
tary jaunts is supplied by the carbon remaining after the air-purifier has broken down the carbon dioxide from the breathed air. Ben used his dirty dishesЧand the fuel pin periodically overflowed, though he drove the cruiser hard. His bracelet had weighed two ounces. Something like six thousand milligrams. The electrical mechanism of the bracelet Сwas now smashed irreparably, but as waste it would more than accomplish an -interplanetary trip if he chose to coast.
He was not coasting. The position of the dwarf blue-white star of this solar system, and of its several planets, was accurately before him on the naviboard. There was a transparent map of the meteor-streams, with their inclination to the ecliptic. With such a map and a divider it was simple enough to navigate, especially when you used detector-screens to find out your results. He worked in the half-light of the instrument dials. He punched the computer and set the motor controls.
УBen,Ф said SallyТs voice, shaken, behind him.
УYes?Ф
He was thinking unhappily. He felt awkward. Sally could never return to civilization or her friends. He, himself, had to vanish completely. The brass hats would go into a monstrous pother of offended dignity, based upon the real fact that Sally had broken quarantine on a planet where ten million people had died of plague. Sally and Ben were outlaws, now. Forever. Unless they lived isolated for the rest of time, they would have to take new names and new identities-and new names and identities are not easy to acquire on civilized planets. They wanted to be married. The ceremony was somehow essential to the way Ben felt about Sally. And he was going to have to find some way to make a living, which did not involve space-navigation or the technical equipment of a technical lieutenant of the Space Navy, because all such persons were very rigorously checked.
He looked. But it was on the arm of his chair. He poked his finger experimentally at it. There was no sensation. He touched it. It vanished. But his hand glowed. Both hands glowed. He gave off a faint, whitish luminosity. Just what Sally had had. But it contracted swiftly. He saw the reflection of his face and head in the glass of a dial. They shone brightly. The rest of him was dark. And he felt vague, formless pluckings at his brain. Something was probing hopefully. It was utterly alien, the Thing that probed for his thoughts. There could be no real contact of minds. He could never communicate with the Thing. But he felt its emotions. It was hopeful, and somehow terribly eager. But there was a dawning of disappointment. Somehow, he knew it was because it could not read his brain. Then he felt the formation of resolve; of a determined, - restless patience.
His face ceased to glow. His hand shone brightly. He held it out and looked at it. The glow quivered, as if impatiently. He put his hand down ~n his navigating instruments. There was the impression of a flash of
luminosity over all the instruments for the least possible part of a second. Then it was gone.
And then Sally made a queer sound. He looked at her. He saw her clearly, even though the control cabin of the cruiser was in darkness. Her face and throat and arms glowed whitely. Even through her clothing diffused faint light showed. The Geiger counter clatteredЧ УIТve . . . got- the Plague again,Ф said Sally, her voice thin. УI .
realize now. IТve got the feeling I . . . had before. The feeling like there is something . . . inside me somehow . . . contented - . . and eager, and
waiting for something, but. . . almost purring while it waits.Ф
Ben Sholto licked his lips. The fact that the luminous Thing had left Sally to rove inquisitively about the ship had made it seem merely one of the curious life-forms of Lore. But now, abruptly, he realized the truth. A plague doesnТt go into the back of instrument-boards, or shine on the frame of a metal chair, or put probing tendrils of alien thoughts into oneТs brain. An ordinary plague doesnТt. But this plague did. The plague on Pharona wasnТt a disease whose lethal effects were the result of toxins secreted by multitudes of submicroscopic organisms or viruses. The plague on Pharona wasЧThings. They flowed into the tissues of women as they flowed through metal. But they fed, somehow, upon the life-force of women. And the women died.
Ten million women and girl-children had died on Pharona because of Things brought back from Lore. The things couldnТt have come on one spaceship in numbers great enough to accomplish such slaughterЧnot if women lived from two days to two weeks after their bodies began to glow. No. The Things must multiply somehow. The patience, the resolution to wait for something, which both Ben and Sally had feltЧthat might be the Thing deciding that for some reason it must remain solitary for a while.
But Sally was the habitation of a Thing, one of those which had wiped out half the human race on Pharona. It interpenetrated her body. It waited eagerly for something. And it purred soundlessly while it waited.
The Universe rolled on. The Galaxy paid no attention. The Administrative Service Appeal Board, sitting on Arcturis II, denied a petition signed by more than three hundred million people inhabiting four planets of Algol. They asked permission to present their grievances directly to the Galactic Commission itself, since the Administrative Service was inextricably tied up in its own rulings and red tape. But the Board ruled that the petition asked action by the Board for which there was no precedent, and which, therefore, was automatically beyond the BoardТs discretion.
A sub-sub-commissioner on Phryne VII married the daughter of a subcommissioner, and traveled in state on a Rim-class battleship to his new post.
A clerk of the Administrative Service unearthed the fact that the charter of the Allioth Colonization Co-operative lacked two commas and
a semi-colon, and that seven million people, therefore, lacked legal title to the cities, factories, and installations they had built, and that they could be displaced by anybody who filed a new application for colonistsТ rights on the planet. The clerk was regarded as a coming man in the Administrative Service.
A fleet captain in the Space-Navy resigned his commission rather than carry out orders commanding him to depopulate the planet Quenn Уby any and all practical means,Ф and was ordered under arrest. The order was carried out by subordinates, who affected to believe that the only practical means was to carry the inhabitants elsewhere. (It was later discovered that a clerical error had sent an order, intended for the Migration-Directive Bureau, to the Space-Navy Bureau. The order was meant to command the repopulation of Quenn by any and all practical means, because it had lost much of its population by emigration. The clerk responsible for the mistake was disciplined, but none of the higher officials who had countersigned it.)
And there was a plague on Pharona which was receiving very little attention, but an entire sub-sector battle fleet was being mobilized to capture a small sports cruiser of space which had defied official orders.
The GC phone muttered and muttered, its volume turned down low. The detectors clanged twice as the little ship hurtled on, but once it was the outermost screen which barely wavered into alarm-intensity, and the second time it was a Navy cruiser coming head-on along the sports-cruiserТs course. It was coming fast, but Ben was going fast. He had kept the convefter going at full capacity for days past, and the bracelet had been converted into kinetic energyЧwith other materials besidesЧof which a reasonable percentage had been imparted to BenТs little ship. Half an ounce of pure energy had been converted into speed. So the small ship smashed into the Navy cruiserТs screens and through them. Had the passage been at a reasonable distanceЧsay, five thousand miles or soЧit might have been just barely possible for the automatic beam-pointers of the cruiser to range him, compute his course and speed in three dimensions, and fire ahead of him so a positron beam would hit squarely.
But the two craft actually passed within twenty miles. The passage would have been closer yet but for the flaring of energy into the Navy shipТs meteor-diverters, which flung both Space-Navy cruiser and sports cruiser of the void aside from all danger of a collision. Such incomputable movements could not be anticipated by range finders. The giant projectors flared, and on the vision screen straight ahead they were visibly higher in the spectrum than was normal. The relative velocity of the two ships was an appreciable fraction of the speed of light itself.
Then the little ship was away, and once beyond screen-detection range, Ben began to decelerate at as violent a rate as he had before accelerated. The Navy now had the line of his flight, and it could compute his maximum acceleration. He would be expected to swerve aside, after his escape
from the hunting ship, in any possible direction. But he would be expected to continue to flee.
A vast dragnet of the fleet would assemble, combing an expanding mushroom of space for the outlaws who carried with them the plague that had killed half of Pharona. The pomposity. of a brass hat had caused the plague, but all the power of the Galactic Commission would be used pitilessly to stamp it out. Giant battleships of space would be entering subether tubes for faster-than-light journeying to the scene of emergency. Monstrous motherships carrying destroyers and scouts would be vanishing in curiously wrinkled diminishment at spots parsecs away, and appearing nearby, reeling quaintly, to spout their brood of stingers to hunt for the sports cruiser which contained one sunken-eyed man and a white-faced girl. There were more than half a million men and thousands of spacecraft engaged in the search for Ben and Sally within twenty-four hours after their narrow passing by the Navy ship. And brass hats had a field day, giving pompous, arbitrary orders and requiring acknowledgements in triplicate.
But the assumption was that Ben was running away. Actually, he was cutting down his velocity as fast as his converters could manage it. He reached the meteor-stream he had headed for at a bare crawl, and worked the little ship into it, and began to drift out and out toward the aphelion point of an unknown comet at a gradually diminishing rate, surrounded by pebbles and boulders and masses of inchoate matter ranging from pinpoints to quasiasteroids in size. This, while the Navy hunted for a tiny ship in headlong ffight. -
УTheyТll have quite a time finding us now,Ф said Ben tiredly, when he Cut off the drive at last. УHow do you feelТ?Ф
УIТm . . . all right, I guess,Ф said Sally, thinly.
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