"Smith, E E 'Doc' - Spacehounds Of Ipc" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

Space Hounds of IPC
(A Tale of the Inter-Plantary Corporation)

By Edward E. Smith


CHAPTER 1
The IPV "Arcturus" Sets Out for MarsЧ

A narrow football of steel, the Inter-Planetary Vessel Arcturus stood upright in her berth
in the dock like an egg in its cup. A hundred feet across and a hundred and seventy feet
deep was that gigantic bowl, its walls supported by the structural steel and concrete of
the dock and lined with hard-packed bumper-layers of hemp and fiber. High into the air
extended the upper half of the ship of spaceЧa sullen gray expanse of fifty-inch
hardened steel armor, curving smoothly upward to a needle prow. Countless hundreds
of fine vertical scratches marred every inch of her surface, and here and there the
stubborn metal was grooved and scored to a depth of inchesЧeach scratch and score
the record of an attempt of some wandering cosmic body to argue the right-of-way with
the stupendous mass of that man-made cruiser of the void.
A burly young man made his way through the throng about the entrance, nodded
unconcernedly to the gatekeeper, and joined the stream of passengers flowing through
the triple doors of the double air-lock and down a corridor to the center of the vessel.
However, instead of entering one of the elevators which were whisking the passengers
up to their staterooms in the upper half of the enormous football, he in some way
caused an opening to appear in an apparently blank steel wall and stepped through it
into the control room.
"Hi, Breck!" the burly one called, as he strode up to the instrument-desk of the
chief pilot and tossed his bag carelessly into a corner. "Behold your computer in the
flesh! What's all this howl and fuss about poor computation?"
"Ho, Steve!" The chief pilot smiled as he shook hands cordially. "Glad to see you
againЧbut don't try to kid the old man. I'm simple enough to believe almost anything,
but some things just aren't being done. We have been yelling, and yelling loud, for
trained computers ever since they started riding us about every one-centimeter change
in acceleration, but I know that you're no more an I-P computer than I am a Digger
Indian. They don't shoot sparrows with coast-defense guns!"
"Thanks for the compliment, Breck, but I'm your computer for this trip, anyway.
Newton, the good old egg, knows what you fellows are up against and is going to do
something about it, if he has to lick all the rest of the directors to do it. He knew that I
was loose for a couple of weeks and asked me to come along this trip to see what I
could see. I'm to check the observatory dataЧthey don't know I'm aboardЧtake the
peaks and valleys off your acceleration curve, if possible, and report to Newton just
what I find out and what I think should be done about it. How early am I?" While the
newcomer was talking, he had stripped the covers from a precise scale model of the
solar system and from a large and complicated calculating machine and had set to work
without a wasted motion or instantЧscaling off upon the model the positions of the
various check-stations and setting up long and involved integrals and equations upon
the calculator.
The older man studied the broad back of the younger, bent over his
computations, and a tender, almost fatherly smile came over his careworn face as he
replied: