"Perry Rhodan 064 - Prisoner of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Rhodan)

"It's a mystery to me how you expect to do that," Rous admitted.
The scientist smiled. "Not to me any longer," he said evenly.






5/ THE GREAT EXPERIMENT

"The slowing process is still taking too long."
"We'll never be able to kill them. They're too fast."
"They've gone into the mountains. As long as they're so close to the winged slaves, we can't attack them."
Relay contacts clicked, video screens lit up and colour patterns flitted across curved projection screens. The reactors hummed somewhere in the depths of the ship.
"We must try to accelerate the slowing process so that events don't take place too far in the past. How are we ever to eliminate an opponent who is always 5 or 10 time-units in the future? We'll never catch him."
Again the shadowy faces bent over the videoscreens, especially the 10th one which showed the miraculous results of advanced technology. This screen showed what had happened just a few minutes before-and it showed it as someone who lived 70,000 times faster than the viewers would see it.
"They can fly, Master."
"And without wings! Probably antigravity."
Again a long pause. Then: "One of them is coming towards us!"
"Alone!"
"What can he want?"
And then, shocked and with sudden certainty: "He's carrying a weapon and flying towards our camera ship! But what we're seeing took place some time-units ago. We've got to do something and-"
"Too late!"
Within seconds all 10 video screens had gone dark.
The aliens' slow-motion photography took precisely 5 minutes to process.
Thus they lived precisely 5 minutes in the past.
5 minutes too many...

* * * *

Fred Harras was not altogether in good spirits as he slowly approached the all but motionless ship, fire-ready impulse-beamer in his right hand.
The camera ship might have been an easy 10 meters wrong; they had not guessed wrong on the ground. 100 meters below Harras stretched the surface of the unknown planet. He hung weightless and controlled his flight with the instruments on the belt he wore beneath his suit. He felt as though he were floating in water.
The ship was only a few meters away. He could plainly see the lenses of the 10 cameras. The first of them was now trained on him. 5 minutes must have gone by before he was noticed. The theory that the slow-motion process required several minutes seemed to be confirmed by that.
Harras spoke into the microphone of his ring-radio. "I'm within firing range. Should I...?"
"What are you waiting for?" Rous' order came in the form of a question.
Harras mumbled an assent and took aim at the first camera. Within the space of less than a second the fine energy beam hit and melted it. But the camera itself was a product of its own time plane and followed the natural laws of that plane. Harras could follow the melting process but the metal droplets and the resulting gas acted like all other objects in this crazy world.
Unendingly slowly, yet noticeably driven on by the normal time-light-fast energy burst, the white-glowing debris floated away, growing ever slower.
The 2nd camera melted, then the 3rd the 4th...
The demolition work was completed in half a minute. If the aliens did not possess a 2nd camera ship, then, they were now blind again.
Harras hesitated. Should he return to the surface or shouldn't he rather attempt to shoot the ship down? It hardly moved and constituted no danger to them but perhaps its interior offered clues about the unknown enemies from another time.
Rous would have to decide.
And Rous decided: "If you think you can find it and destroy some appropriate spot, then try it, Harras. Perhaps then it will actually crash and Steiner can have some work to do at last."
Maybe at the 'stern,' Harras thought, and moved carefully around the silvery shining aircraft. He was cautious not to blunder into the clearly visible exhaust, which forced its way out the lens-jets at just 4 kilometres a second. But what did 4 km/sec mean compared to real light-speed?
He allowed himself to drop back and a bit to the side, raised his weapon and aimed it towards the lens system at the stem. Then he pressed the firing button.
The result was obvious and decidedly impressive.
The ship exploded.
It exploded in slow motion: at first expanding at a speed of half a meter per second, then more slowly. Harras did not find it difficult to dodge the debris, which then began to sink seemingly as light as downy feathers. Finally, half a minute after the explosion, the debris seemed to hang in the air as though glued to various places on the outer surface of a vast and invisible sphere. Only when one looked at it for awhile did he realize that everything was falling very slowly, the lower segments somewhat more quickly than the upper. The sphere was gradually becoming an egg, thanks to gravity.
Through his receiver Harras heard the cries of his companions, who had witnessed the spectacle from the ground.
"Incredible!"
That was undoubtedly Steiner, who was still able to marvel over the optically perceivable effects of time-dilation even though he understood them well enough.