"Norton, Andre - Solar Queen 04 - Postmarked The Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

claws carried a soporific that hit the crew like a plague.

Dane was sure an inspection of the treasure room would assure him whether or not there was any
unaccounted-for cargo on board, since a cargo master by long training carried most of his inventory in his
head, as well as on record tapes.

They had to let him do it. The safety of the Queen by necessity came above all else. But it was Tau who
gave him a shoulder to lean on and the captain himself who went down ladder ahead of Dane, reaching up
to support the younger man's weak legs.

And Dane needed that support by the time they reached the level of the treasure room. He held fast to Tau
for a long instant, his heart pounding, gasping. Now Tau's words that he had been very close to death
struck starkly, but he stumbled on, reaching for the release.

Trewsworld was a frontier planet, lightly settled. The bulk of the mail they carried for her single port city
was light--micro tapes of agricultural information, personal communications between settlers and off-
world, a bag of official tapes for the Patrol post. There was little enough security material, and the major
portion was the embryo boxes.

Since the importation of domestic animals was experimental on most worlds and very carefully supervised,
any such shipment was top security. And Ecology had firm rules on what might or might not be
transferred. Too many times in the past, the balance of nature on some planet had been thoughtlessly
overturned by such importation of a life form that had no local enemy, which perhaps developed a mutated
strain beyond control, to speedily become a menace rather than the source of profit the importers had
intended.

After exhaustive tests the pioneers were allowed imports of embryos for stock raising, and the Queen now
carried fifty such--lathsmer chicks in sealed containers. These were lab-developed and worth far more
than their weight in credits--since Trewsworld had proved an acceptable climate and lathsmer fowl were
luxury items across a wide sector of space. Not only could the adults be plucked once a year for their fine
down, but young chicks were epicures' delight for the table. If the lathsmer were raised in quantity, the
pioneer settlers of the planet had an export item to establish them firmly in galactic trade.

To Dane these were the major "treasures" the Queen carried. But the boxes were secured by double bolting
and shock packing, just as he had supervised. They were intact and protected. The few other bags and
boxes were as undisturbed, and he finally had to admit that as far as he could tell, there had been no
tampering. But when Tau helped him out, he double-sealed the portal as it should have been before the
Queen lifted.

The original problem remained unsolved. A dead man in a mask, aboard for what reason? Until they came
out of hyper, which meant into the Trewsworld system, there was no chance to communicate with the
Patrol or other authorities.

Tau had made a detailed study of the body before it had been sealed off in a hull pocket for deep freeze.
Save that the stranger had plainly died from a heart condition aggravated by the strain of take-off, that
examination told them nothing. The man was of Terran descent with no mutating modifications. In these
years of space travel he could have been any age past youth and from a number of worlds where the
inhabitants were so akin to Terrans as to make them indistinguishable. None of the Queen's crew had seen
him before, nor was the poison used on Dane isolated and named by the medic, in spite of his research.