"Murray Leinster - Propagandist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

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MURRAY LEINSTER

PROPAGANDIST

You REMEMBER the Space Assassins, of course. They were that race of which no human being ever
saw a living member, and escaped to tell about it afterward. You also remember the deadly, far-flung
search that

was made for their base, their home. They'd been sniping our ships for a long time. But then a squadron
of their space fleet raided the Earth colony on Capella Three and without warning or provocation or
alternative slaughtered every one of the colony's half million human population. Then the hunt for them
began.

This is the story of one of the incidents of that hunt тАФand also it's the story of a dog named Buck.

Buck trailed his master sedately into the control room of the light cruiser Kennessee. He waited patiently
until the skipper looked up from the electron telescope. Then Buck's masterтАФHoldenтАФsat down with
the sheaf of wave records he'd brought from the communications room. Buck blinked wisely at the
skipper and lay down on the floor with an audible, loose-jointed thump. He put his nose between his
paws and sighed heavily. But the sigh was not of un-happiness. Buck was a simple dog. He was friendly
with everybody on the Kennessee, from the skipper himself to the lowliest mess boy, but his master and
private deity was Junior Lieutenant Holden. Whithersoever Holden went, there Buck went alsoтАФ
regulations permittingтАФand waited until Holden wanted to go somewhere else.

Now he ky on the foamite flooring. He heard his master's voice, and the skipper's in reply. They were
concerned and uneasy. Buck dozed. Little, half-formed dreams ran through his slumber. Memory
dreams, mostly, of himself racing gloriously through tall grass on the green fields of Earth, with Holden
always somewhere near. The voices of the two men formed a half-heard background to his dozing.

The men were troubled. The Kennessee rode a comet's orbit through the solar system of Masa Gamma,
her drive off and giving no sign of life. She was impersonating a barren visitor from the void, spying out
the ground for what would beтАФif she was successfulтАФthe monstrous destruction of an entire

race by planet-smasher guided missiles and the merciless weapons of an Earth fleet. The men did not
like it. They'd hoped that some other ship would be the one to meet with success in its search. But they
had their orders.

Some weeks back the ship had dropped from overdrive to less-than-light speed far beyond the outermost
of the Masa Gamma planets. She'd decelerated to an appropriate speed and course for a wanderer, and
she'd begun her ride along a comet's path through the eleven-planet system. And almost immediately her
receptors had picked up evidence of civilization here. Space radio signals. They were unintelligible, of
course, but they told that here was a civilization comparable to human culture on a technical basis. And

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