"The Lost Masters Volume 2A" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrison William)

Mel Oliver took a deep breath, listened carefully for a moment, and then,
fighting against the acceleration which pushed him back, crawled out from behind
the crate of sup- plies where he had stowed away. The crate itself was firmly
clamped to the floor, so that no matter whether the ship speeded up or slowed
down, it wouldn't shift around.
He wouldn't be able to hide long. With the takeoff only a few minutes behind
them, the Captain and the engineers might still be busy checking the engines,
making sure that the atomic fuel was disintegrating properly, that the ship was
on its carefully calculated course. But soon they'd get around t estimating the
air being recirculated through the different compartments, they'd take readings
of the temperature all through the ship. They'd detect the extra air he was
using up, the heat his body was giving off. They'd know a stowaway was aboard,
and they'd find him.
What should he do before then?
A message, he thought, I have to send a message to Mars., I don't have any
money, but if I walked up to the ship's operator and just pretended I was a
passenger
He shook his head. The radio operator would look at him and see at a glance how
young he was. Just a kid, everybody called him, not a man at all. Not quite old
enough to vote, even under the new laws that lowered the voting age to eighteen
in many places. And what would a kid like him be doing on this ship? No, that
wouldn't work. He'd have to think of something better.
A door opened, and he slipped back behind the crate. Were they aware of his
presence already?
A man's voice, which seemed to slur its words in a peculiar way, said quietly,
"There is no one around, O Powerful One. We can talk here."
A deeper voice replied, a voice that seemed to rumble like a peal of thunder in
the ship's hold, even though its owner tried to keep its tones soft. "What is
there to talk about? We know we can expect their dirty tricks. We'll just have
to be ready for them."
"Perhaps we should warn our noble Captain."
Mel couldn't see them, but he knew that the man with the deep voice must be
shaking his head. "No good. He'll just be mad at us for causing him trouble."
"But if we tell that he has a pair of Suspicious Ones on board, he will be
forced to act."
"We don't know who the passengers are. And he isn't going to investigate the
whole list, just on our say-so. No, we'll have to keep this to ourselves, and
watch out for trouble."
So I'm not the only one who's worried about what's going to happen, thought Mel.
For a moment he wondered who the two men were, and what kind of trouble they
were afraid of. Then, as the door opened again and he heard them leave, he
dismissed them from his mind. The important thing right now was that his
presence here was still unsuspected.
As he crouched behind the crate, he began to have a curious sensation, as if
somebody had tilted the ship beneath him. That was absurd, of course. He held on
to the crate and looked around. Nothing had changed, and yetЧ
Then he figured it out. So long as the ship was accelerating, he could feel a
pressure toward the stern, toward the place where the Earth lay. That pressure,
due to the inertia of his body, took the place of gravity, gave his body weight.
It made the difference between up, which was forward, and down, which lay toward