"Murray Leinster - Exploration Team" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

days. Fortunately, NESFA Press has just brought out a big retrospective
anthology of his work, First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster (NESFA
Press, P.O. Box 809, Framingham, MA 07101-0203, $27), which features most of
his best stories. Buy it while you still can, since much of this work is
unfindable anywhere else.
A multi-talented man, Will Jenkins, the person behind the Murray
Leinster mask, was a successful inventor as well as an autho├з having created,
among other things, a front-projection method for filming backgrounds still
used in the film industry today, where it is known as the тАЬLeinster
Projector.тАЭ During World War II, he also came up with an ingenious method for
disguising the wake left by submarine periscopes that probably saved the lives
of thousands of submarine sailors over the course of the war. He died in 1975.




I
The nearer moon went by overhead. It was jagged and irregular in shape,
and was probably a captured asteroid. Huyghens had seen it often enough, so he
did not go out of his quarters to watch it hurtle across the sky with
seemingly the speed of an atmosphere-flier, occulting the stars as it went.
Instead, he sweated over paper work, which should have been odd because he was
technically a felon and all his labors on Loren Two felonious. It was odd,
too, for a man to do paper work in a room with steel shutters and a huge bald
eagleтАФuntetheredтАФdozing on a three-inch perch set in the wall. But paper work
was not HuyghensтАЩ real task. His only assistant had tangled with a
night-walker and the furtive Kodius Company ships had taken him away to where
Kodius Company ships came from. Huyghens had to do two menтАЩs work in
loneliness. To his knowledge, he was the only man in this solar system.
Below him, there were snufflings. Sitka Pete got up heavily and padded
to his water pan. He lapped the refrigerated water and sneezed violently.
Sourdough Charley waked and complained in a rumbling growl. There were divers
other rumblings and mutterings below. Huyghens called reassuringly, тАЬEasy
there!тАЭ and went on with his work. He finished a climate report, and fed
figures to a computer, and while it hummed over them he entered the inventory
totals in the station log, showing what supplies remained. Then he began to
write up the log proper.
тАЬSitka Pete,тАЭ he wrote, тАЬhas apparently solved the problem of killing
individual sphexes. He has learned that it doesnтАЩt do to hug them and that his
claws canтАЩt penetrate their hideтАФnot the top hide, anyhow. Today Semper
notified us that a pack of sphexes had found the scent-trail to the
station. Sitka hid downwind until they arrived. Then he cha rged from the rear
and brought his paws together on both sides of a sphex тАШs head in a terrific
pair of slaps. It must have been like two twelve-inch shells arriving from
opposite directions at the same time. It must have scrambled the sphex тАШs
brains as if they were eggs. It dropped dead. He killed two more with such
mighty pairs of wallops. Sourdough Charley watched, grunting, and when the
sphexes turned on Sitka, he charged in his turn. I, of course, couldnтАЩt shoot
too close to him, so he might have fared badly but that Faro Nell came pouring
out of the bear quarters to help. The diversion enabled Sitka Pete to resume