"Andre Norton - Ross Murdock 03 - The Defiant Agents" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

"Eighteen months ago?" Ashe protested. But Ruthven was nodding. "Camdon was
in on this from the very first. We've had the tapes in and out for study all
that time, and the new detector against snooping was not put in service
until two weeks ago. This case came up on the first check, didn't it?" he
asked Waldour.
"First check," the security man agreed. "Camdon left the base six days ago.
But he has been in and out on his liaison duties from the first."
"He had to go through those search points every time," Kelgarries protested.
"Thought nothing could get through those." The colonel brightened. "Maybe he
got his snooper films and then couldn't take them off base. Have his
quarters been turned out?"
Waldour's lips lifted in a grimace of exasperation. "Please, Colonel," he
said wearily, "this is not a kindergarten exercise. In confirmation of his
success, listen . . ." He touched a button on his desk and out of the air
came the emotionless chant of a newscaster.
"Fears for the safety of Lassiter Camdon, space expeditor for the Western
Alliance Space Council, have been confirmed by the discovery of burned
wreckage in the mountains. Mr. Camdon was returning from a mission to the
Star Laboratory when his plane lost contact with Ragnor Field. Reports of a
storm in that vicinity immediately raised concern -- " Waldour snapped off
the voice.
"True -- or a cover for his escape?" Kelgarries wondered aloud.
"Could be either. They may have deliberately written him off when they had
all they wanted," Waldour acknowledged. "But to get back to our troubles --
Dr. Ruthven is right to assume the worst. I believe we can only insure the
recovery of our project by thinking that these tapes were snooped anywhere
from eighteen months ago to last week. And we must work accordingly!"
The room fell silent as they all considered that. Ashe slipped down in his
chair, his thoughts enmeshed in memories. First there had been Operation
Retrograde, when specially trained "time agents" had shuttled back and forth
in history, striving to locate and track down the mysterious source of alien
knowledge which Greater Russia had suddenly -- and ominously -- begun to
use. Ashe himself and a younger partner, Ross Murdock, had been part of the
final action which had solved the mystery, having traced that source of
knowledge not to an earlier and forgotten human civilization but to wrecked
spaceships from an eon-old galactic empire -- an empire which had flourished
when glacial ice covered most of Europe and northern America and humans were
cave-dwelling primitives. Murdock, trapped by the Russians in one of those
wrecked ships, had inadvertently summoned its original owners. They had
descended to trace -- through the Russian time stations -- the looters of
their wrecks, destroying the whole Russian time-travel system. But the
aliens had not chanced on the parallel western system. And a year later that
had been put into Project Folsom One. Again Ashe, Murdock, and a newcomer,
the Apache Travis Fox, had gone back into time to the Arizona of the Folsom
hunters, discovering what they wanted -- two ships, one wrecked, the other
intact. And when the project had attempted to bring the intact ship back
into the present, chance had triggered controls set by the dead alien
commander. A party of four, Ashe, Murdock, Fox, and a technician, had then
made an involuntary space voyage, touching three worlds on which the
galactic civilization of the far past had left ruins. Voyage tape fed into