"Murray Leinster - First Contact (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

only an irregularly shaped patch of darkness astern against which stars shone unwinking. The
Lianvabon dived into the nebula, and it seemed as if it bored into a tunnel of darkness with walls
of shining fog.
Which was exactly what the spaceship was doing. The most distant photographs of all had
disclosed structural features in the nebula. It was not amorphous. It had form. As the Lianvabon
drew nearer, indications of structure grew more distinct, and Tommy Dort had argued for a curved
approach for photographic reasons. So the spaceship had come up to the nebula on a vast
logarithmic curve, and Tommy had been able to take successive photographs from slightly different
angles and get stereopairs which showed the nebula in three dimensions; which disclosed billowings
and hollows and an actually complicated shape. In places, the nebula displayed convolutions like
those of a human brain. It was into one of those hollows that the spaceship now plunged. They had
been called тАЬdeepsтАЭ by analogy with crevasses in the ocean floor. And they promised to be useful.
The skipper relaxed. One of a skipperтАЩs functions, nowadays, is to think of things to


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worry about, and then to worry about them. The skipper of the Lianvabon was conscientious. Only
after a certain instrument remained definitely nonregistering did he ease himself back in his
seat.
тАЬIt was just hardly possible,тАЭ he said heavily, тАЬthat those deeps might be nonluminous
gas. But theyтАЩre empty. So weтАЩll be able to use overdrive as long as weтАЩre in them.тАЭ
It was a light-year-and-a-half from the edge of the nebula to the neighborhood of the
double star which was its heart. That was the problem. A nebula is a gas. It is so thin that a
cometтАЩs tail is solid by comparison, but a ship traveling on overdriveтАФabove the speed of light
does not want to hit even a merely hard vacuum. It needs pure emptiness, such as exists between
the stars. But the Lianvabon could not do much in this expanse of mist if it was limited to speeds
a merely hard vacuum would permit.
The luminosity seemed to close in behind the spaceship, which slowed and slowed and
slowed. The overdrive went off with the sudden pinging sensation which goes all over a person when
the overdrive field is released.
Then, almost instantly, bells burst into clanging, strident uproar all through the ship.
Tommy was almost deafened by the alarm bell which rang in the captainтАЩs room before the quarter
master shut it off with a flip of his hand. But other bells could be heard ringing throughout the
rest of the ship, to be cut off as automatic doors closed one by one.
Tommy Dort stared at the skipper. The skipperтАЩs hands clenched. He was up and staring over
the quartermasterтАЩs shoulder. One indicator was apparently having convulsions. Others strained to
record their findings. A spot on the diffusedly bright mistiness of a bowquartering visiplate grew
brighter as the automatic scanner focused on it. That was the direction of the object which had
sounded collision-alarm. But the object locator itselfтАФaccording to its reading, there was one
solid object some eighty thousand miles awayтАФan object of no great size. But there was another
object whose distance varied from extreme range to zero, and whose size shared its impossible
advance and retreat.
тАЬStep up the scanner,тАЭ snapped the skipper.
The extra-bright spot on the scanner rolled outward, obliterating the undifferentiated
image behind it. Magnification increased. But nothing appeared. Absolutely nothing. Yet the radio
locator insisted that something. monstrous and invisible made lunatic dashes toward the Lianvabon,
at speeds which inevitably implied collision, and then fled coyly away at the same rate.
The visiplate went up to maximum magnification. Still nothing. The skipper ground his