"Robert F. Young - The Star Eel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

Robert Young's latest story is a gripping tale of a deep-space battle between
two gargantuan organic-metallic spaceships, as depicted in this month's striking
Sternbach cover.


The Star Eel
by ROBERT F. YOUNG
Deep in the belly of the space-whale, Starfinder awakes. The seis-miclike tremor that shook him out
of sleep is not repeated, but the capsized carafe on the cabinet by his bunk testifies it was not a dream.
At first he is unable to make any sense out of the hieroglyphic message that the whale projects into
his mind:

He breaks it down into its two components тАФ and . is the hieroglyph the whale used whenever it
wishes to indicate itself. Obviously, then, signifies a separate entity. An entity that has attached itself to
the whale's back.
Abruptly he understands: the whale has been attacked by a star eel!
Horrified, Starfinder dons the clean captain's uniform the ward- robizer laid out for him while he
slept. He buckles his Weikanzer .39 belt round his waist and checks to see whether the weapon is fully
charged; then he leaves the cabin. As he pounds up the forward companionway to the bridge, he reviews
the many tales he heard about star eels when he was a Jonah. All of them are unpleasant, and all of them
emphasize an ineluctable fact of life тАФ that when a star eel attaches itself to a whale and drains it of its
2-omicron-vii radiation, the whale is as dead as though a Jonah deganglioned it, and ready for the orbital
shipyards on Altair IV.
The pale star-pulsing blur of Messier 31 is centered in the bridge screen. Although the whale
con-ceivably could accomplish such a journey if it dived deep enough into the Sea of Time, it has no such
intention. It merely happens to be drifting in that direction.
Starfinder turns his attention to the dorsal screens. They frame square close-ups of the eel's black
underside. There is no way he can see the creature in toto. However, he does not need to see it to know
what it looks like: he has seen photos of its fellows. And read about them as well. Thus he knows that
this one, if it is typical of its kind, is considerably smaller than the whale and possesses sonic vision in the
form of a long antennalike tail. He knows that despite the dissimilarity of size and habitat it has much in
common with the lamphry of the fresh-water lakes of Earth. He knows that it's "skin" consists of a hard
organic-metallic substance that is analogous but not identical to the transsteel "skin" of the whale. He
knows that its underside it magnetized and allows it to cling to its host during the length of time necessary
тАФ usually about twenty hours тАФ for it to absorb its host's "lifeblood." He knows that it reproduces by
fission. He knows that its corpse can be converted into a shapeship at half the cost it would take to build
a ship of similar dimensions from scratch. And although he has never seen one, he knows there are such
ships in existence.
There is a chance that the eel has not fed for a long time, that its magnetic grip can be broken. It is a
chance worth taking. Starfinder holds onto a nearby stanchion and braces himself. "Roll, whale," he
says. "Break free!"
The whale rolls. Mightily. It is as though a cosmic storm rages in the Sea of Space. As though the
star-flecked immensities are alter-nating between troughs and waves. Gradually the storm abates, and
presently the double hieroglyph reappears in Starfinder's mind тАФ.
The whale has failed.
Starfinder ponders the pro-blem. It will do no good for the whale to dive тАФ it will only take the star
eel into the past with it. And after the eel absorbs the last of the whale's 2-omicron-vii radiation, it will
die; whereupon Time, intoler-ant of paradoxes, will regurgitate it back to the present, the eel with it.
There simply is no way that the whale can dislodge this antagonis-tic symbiont that took it unawares.
Unless Starfinder can accomplish the task, it is doomed.