"Norton, Andre - Time Traders II" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

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 the controls of the ship had taken the men, and, when rewound, it had almost
miraculously returned them to Earth with a cargo of similar tapes found on a world which might have
been the capital for a government comprised of whole solar systems. Tapes--each one was the key to
another planet.
And that ancient galactic knowledge was treasure such as humans had never dreamed of
possessing, though many rightly feared that such discoveries could be weapons in hostile hands.
Tapes chosen at random had been shared with other nations at a great drawing. But each nation
secretly remained convinced that, in spite of the untold riches it might hold as a result of chance, its
rivals had done better. Right at this moment, Ashe knew there were Western agents trying to do at the
Russian project just what Camdon had done there. However, that did not help in solving their present
dilemma about Operation Cochise, now perhaps the most important part of their plan.
Some of the tapes were duds, either too damaged to be useful, or set for worlds hostile to humans
lacking the special equipment the earlier star-traveling race had had at its command. Of the five tapes
they now knew had been snooped, three would be useless to the enemy.
But one of the remaining two . . . Ashe frowned. One was the goal toward which they had been
working feverishly for a full twelve months. Their assignment was to plant a colony across the gulf of
space--a successful colony--later to be used as a steppingstone to other worlds . . .
"So we have to move faster." Ruthven's comment reached Ashe through his stream of memories.
"I thought you required at least three more months to conclude personnel training," Waldour
observed.