"A. E. Van Vogt - The Voyage of the Space Beagle (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Vogt A E)

Seconds went by. Then Coeurl noticed that he had departed from the big vessel at right angles to its course. He was still so close that he could see the jagged hole through which he had escaped. Men in armour stood silhouetted against the brightness behind them. Both they and the ship grew noticeably smaller. Then the men were gone, and there was only the ship with its blaze of a thousand blurring portholes.
Coeurl was turning away from it now, rapidly. He curved a full ninety degrees by his instrument board, and then set the controls for top acceleration. Thus within little more than a minute after his escape, he was heading back in the direction from which the big vessel had been coming all these hours.
Behind him, the gigantic globe shrank rapidly, became too small for individual portholes to be visible. Almost straight ahead, Coeurl saw a tiny, dim ball of light-his own sun, he realized. There, with other coeurls, he could build an interstellar-space ship and travel to stars with inhabited planets. Because it was so important, he felt suddenly frightened. He had turned away from the rear viewing plates. Now he glanced into them again. The globe was still there, a tiny dot of light in the immense blackness of space. Suddenly, it twinkled and was gone.
For a moment, he had the startled impression that, just before it disappeared, it moved. But he could see nothing. He wondered uneasily if they had shut off all their lights and were following him in the darkness. It seemed clear that he would not be safe until he actually landed.
Worried and uncertain, he gave his attention again to the forward viewing plates. Almost immediately, he had a sharp sense of dismay. The dim sun toward which he was heading was not growing larger. It was visibly smaller. It became a pin point in the dark distance. It vanished.
Fear swept through Coeurl like a cold wind. For minutes he peered tensely into the space ahead, hoping frantically that his one landmark would become visible again. But only the remote stars glimmered there, unwinking points against a velvet background of unfathomable distance.
But wait! One of the points was growing larger. With every muscle taut, Coeurl watched the point become a dot. It grew into a round ball of light and kept on expanding. Bigger, bigger, it became. Suddenly it shimmered, and there before him, lights glaring from every porthole, was the great globe of the space ship-the very ship which a few minutes before he had watched vanish behind him.
Something happened to Coeurl in that moment. His mind was spinning like a flywheel, faster and faster. It flew apart into a million aching fragments. His eyes almost started from their sockets as, like a maddened animal, he raged in his small quarters. His tentacles clutched at precious instruments and flung them in a fury of frustration. His paws smashed at the very walls of his ship. Finally, in a brief flash of sanity, he knew that he couldn't face the inevitable fire of disintegrators that would now be directed against him from a safe distance.
It was a simple thing to create the violent cell disorganization that freed every droplet of id from his vital organs.
One last snarl of defiance twisted his lips. His tentacles weaved blindly. And then, suddenly weary beyond all his strength to combat, he sank down. Death came quietly after so many, many hours of violence.
Captain Leeth took no chances. When the firing ceased and it was possible to approach what was left of the lifeboat, the searchers found small masses of fused metal, and only here and there remnants of what had been Coeurl's body.
"Poor pussy!" said Morton. "I wonder what he thought when he saw us appear ahead of him, after his own sun disappeared. Understanding nothing of anti-accelerators, he didn't know that we could stop short in space, whereas it would take him more than three hours. He would seem to be heading in the direction of his own planet, but actually he'd be drawing farther and farther away from it. He couldn't possibly have guessed that, when we stopped, he flashed past us, and that then all we had to do was follow him and put on our little act of being his sun until we were close enough to destroy him. The whole cosmos must have seemed topsy-turvy to him."
Grosvenor listened to the account with mixed emotions. The entire incident was rapidly blurring, losing shape, dissolving into darkness. The moment-by-moment details would never again be recalled by an individual exactly as they had occurred. The danger they had been in already seemed remote.
"Never mind the sympathy!" Grosvenor heard Kent say. "We've got a job-to kill every cat on that miserable world."
Korita murmured softly. "That should be simple. They are but primitives. We have merely to settle down, and they will come to us, cunningly expecting to delude us." He half turned to Grosvenor. "I still believe that will be true," he said in a friendly tone, "even if our young friend's 'beast' theory turned out to be correct. What do you think, Mr. Grosvenor?"
"I'd go even a little further," Grosvenor said. "As a historian, you will undoubtedly agree that no known attempt at total extermination has ever proved successful. Don't forget that pussy's attack on us was based on a desperate need for food; the resources of this planet apparently can't support this breed much longer. Pussy's brethren know nothing about us, and therefore are not a menace. So why not just let them die of starvation?"


CHAPTER SEVEN
Nexialism is the science of joining in an orderly fashion the knowledge of one field of learning with that of other fields. It provides techniques for speeding up the processes of absorbing knowledge and of using effectively what has been learned. You are cordially invited to attend.
Lecturer, ELLIOTT GROSVENOR
Place, Nexial Department
Time, 1550, 9/7/1
[Footnote: The ship operated on what was called Star Time, based on a hundred-minute hour and a twenty-hour day. The week had ten days, with a thirty-day month and a three-hundred-and-sixty-day year. The days were numbered, not named, and the calendar was reckoned from the moment of take-off.]
Grosvenor hung the notice on the already well-covered bulletin board. Then he stepped back to survey his handiwork. The announcement competed with eight other lectures, three motion pictures, four educational films, nine discussion groups, and several sporting events. In addition, there would be individuals who remained in their quarters to read, the spontaneous gatherings of friends, the half-dozen bars and commissaries, each of which could expect its full quota of customers.
Nevertheless, he was confident his would be read. Unlike the others, it was not just a sheet of paper. It was a gadget about a centimetre in thickness. The print was a silhouette focused on the surface from inside. A paper-thin chromatic wheel, made of light-battery material, turned magnetically and provided the varicoloured light source. The letters changed colour singly and in groups. Because the frequency of the emitted light was subtly, magnetically, altered from moment to moment, the pattern of colour was never repeated.
The notice stood out from its drab surroundings like a neon sign. It would be seen, all right.
Grosvenor headed for the dining salon. As he entered, a man at the door thrust a card into his hand. Grosvenor glanced at it curiously.
KENT FOR DIRECTOR
Mr. Kent is the head of the largest department on our ship. He is noted for his co-operation with other departments. Gregory Kent is a scientist with a heart, who understands the problems of other scientists. Remember, your ship, in addition to its military complement of 180 officers and men, carries 804 scientists headed by an administration, hastily elected by a small minority before the take-off. This situation must be rectified. We are entitled to democratic representation.
ELECTION MEETING, 9/7/1 1500 HOURS
ELECT KENT DIRECTOR
Grosvenor slipped the card into his pocket and went into the brilliantly lighted room. It seemed to him that tense individuals like Kent seldom considered the long-run effects of their efforts to divide a group of men into hostile camps. Fully fifty per cent of interstellar expeditions in the previous two hundred years had not returned. The reasons could only be deduced from what had happened aboard ships that did come back. The record was of dissension among the members of the expedition, bitter disputes, disagreements as to objectives, and the formation of splinter groups. These latter increased in number almost in direct proportion to the length of the journey.
Elections were a recent innovation in such expeditions. Permission to hold them had been given because men were reluctant to be bound irrevocably to the will of appointed leaders. But a ship was not a nation in miniature. Once on the way, it could not replace casualties. Faced with catastrophe, its human resources were limited.
Frowning over the potentialities, annoyed that the time of the political meeting coincided with his own lecture, Grosvenor headed for his table. The dining room was crowded. He found his companions for the week already eating. There were three of them, junior scientists from different departments.
As he sat down, one of the men said cheerfully, "Well, what defenseless woman's character shall we assassinate today?"
Grosvenor laughed good-naturedly, but he knew that the remark was only partly intended as humour. Conversation among the younger men tended towards a certain sameness. Talk leaned heavily on women and sex. In this all-masculine expedition, the problem of sex had been chemically solved by the inclusion of specific drugs in the general diet. That took away the physical need, but it was emotionally unsatisfying.
No one answered the question. Carl Dennison, a junior chemist, scowled at the speaker, then turned to Grosvenor. "How're you going to vote, Grove?"
"On the secret ballot," said Grosvenor. "Now let's get back to the blonde Allison was telling us about this morning-"
Dennison persisted: "You'll vote for Kent, won't you?"
Grosvenor grinned. "Haven't given it a thought. Election is still a couple of months away. What's wrong with Morton?"
"He's practically a government-appointed man."
"So am I. So are you."
"He's only a mathematician, not a scientist in the true sense of the word."
"That's a new one on me," Grosvenor said. "I've been labouring for years under the delusion that mathematicians were scientists."
"That's just it. Because of the superficial resemblance, it is a delusion." Dennison was clearly trying to put over some private conception of his own. He was an earnest, heavy-set individual, and he leaned forward now as if he had already made his point. "Scientists have to stick together. Just imagine, here's an entire shipload of us, and what do they put over us?-a man who deals in abstractions. That's no training for handling practical problems."
"Funny, I thought he was doing rather well in smoothing out the problems of us working men."
"We can smooth out our own problems." Dennison sounded irritated.
Grosvenor had been punching buttons. Now his food began to slide up from the vertical conveyor at the centre of the table. He sniffed. "Ah, roast sawdust, straight from the chemistry department. It smells delicious. The question is, has the same amount of effort been lavished to make the sawdust from the brushwood of the cat planet as nourishing as the sawdust we brought?" He held up his hand. "Don't answer. I don't wish to be disillusioned about the integrity of Mr. Kent's department, even though I don't like his behaviour. You see, I asked him for some of the co-operation they mention on the card, and he told me to call back in ten years. I guess he forgot about the election. Besides, he's got a nerve scheduling a political meeting on the same night that I'm giving a lecture." He began to eat.
"No lecture is as important as this rally. We're going to discuss matters of policy that will affect everybody on the ship, including you." Dennison's face was flushed, his voice harsh. "Look, Grove, you can't possibly have anything against a man you don't even know very well. Kent is the kind of person who won't forget his friends."