Clifford D. Simak - Aliens for Neighbors 06 - Jackpot

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 57.56KB 22 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Jackpot

Clifford D Simak

I found Doc in the dispensary. He had on quite a load. I worked him over

some to bring him half awake.

"Get sobered up," I ordered curtly. "We made planet-fall.

We've got work to do."

I took the bottle and corked it and set it high up on the shelf, where it

wasn't right at hand.

Doc managed to achieve some dignity. "You needn't worry,

Captain. As medic of this tub .... "

"I want all hands up and moving. We may have something out there."

"I know," Doc said mournfully. "When you talk like that, it's bound to be

a tough one. An off-beat climate and atmosphere pure poison."

"It's Earth-type, oxygen, and the climate's fine so far.

Nothing to be afraid of. The analysers gave it almost perfect rating."

Doc groaned and held his head between his hands. "Those analysers of ours

do very well if they tell us whether it is hot or cold or if the air is fit to

breathe. We're a haywire outfit,

Captain."

"We do all right," I said.

"We're scavengers and sometimes birds of prey. We scour the

Galaxy for anything that's loose."

I paid no attention to him. That was the way he always talked when he had

a skin full.

"You get up to the galley," I told him, "and let Pancake pour some coffee

into you. I want you on your feet and able to do your fumbling best."

But Doc wasn't ready to go just yet. "What is it this time?"

"A silo. The biggest thing you ever saw. It's ten or fifteen miles across

and goes up clear out of sight."

"A silo is a building to store winter forage. Is this a farming planet ?"

"No," I said, "it's desert. And it isn't a silo. It just looks like one."

"Warehouse?" asked Doc. "City? Fortress? Temple--but that doesn't make any

difference to us, does it, Captain ? We loot temples, too."

"Get up!" I yelled at him. "Get going."

He made it to his feet. "I imagine the populace has come out to greet us.

Appropriately, I hope."

"There's no populace," I said. "The silo's just standing there alone."

"Well, well," said Doc. "A second-storey job."

He started staggering up the catwalk and I knew he'd be all right. Pancake

knew exactly how to get him sobered up.

I went back to the port and found that Frost had everything all set. He

had the guns ready and the axes and the sledges, the coils of rope and the

canteens of water and all the stuff we'd need. As second in command, Frost was

invaluable. He knew what to do and did it. I don't know what I'd have done

without him.

I stood in the port and looked out at the silo. We were a mile or so away

from it, but it was so big that it seemed to be much closer. This near to it,

it seemed to be a wall. It was just Godawful big.

"A place like that", said Frost, "could hold a lot of loot."

"If there isn't someone or something there to stop us taking it. If we can

get into it."

"There are openings along the base. They look like entrances.''

"With doors ten feet thick."

I wasn't being pessimistic. I was being logical--I'd seen so many things

that looked like billions turn into complicated headaches that I never allowed

myself much hope until I had my hands on something I knew would bring us cash.

Hutch Murdock, the engineer, came climbing up the catwalk.

As usual, he had troubles. He didn't even stop to catch his breath.

"I tell you," he said to me, "one of these days those engines will just

simply fall apart and leave us hanging out in space light-years from nowhere.

We work all the blessed time to keep them turning over."

I clapped him on the shoulder. "Maybe this is it. Maybe after this we can

buy a brand-new ship."

But it didn't cheer him up. He knew as well as I did that I was talking to

keep up my spirit as well as his.

"Someday," he said, "we'll have bad trouble on our hands.

Those boys of mine will drive a soap bubble across three hundred

light-years if it's got an engine in it. But it's got to have an engine. And

this wreck we got .... "

He would have kept right on, but Pancake blew the horn for breakfast.

Doc was alteady at the table and he seemed to be functioning. He had a

moderate case of shudders and he seemed a little pale.

He was a little bitter, too, and somewhat poetic.

"So we gather glory," he told us. "We go out and lap it up.

We haunt the ruins and we track the dream and we come up dripping cash."

"Doc," I said, "shut up."

He shut up. There was no one on the ship I had to speak to twice.

We didn't dally with the food. We crammed it down and left.

Pancake left the dishes standing on the table and came along with us.

We got into the silo without any trouble. There were entrances all around

the base and there weren't any doors.

There was not a thing or anyone to stop us walking in.

It was quiet and solemn inside--and unspectacular. It reminded me of a

monstrous office building.

It was all cut up with corridors, with openings off the corridors leading

into rooms. The rooms were lined with what looked like filing cases.

We walked for quite a while, leaving paint markers along the walls to lead

us back to the entrance. Get lost inside a place like that and one could

wander maybe a lifetime finding his way out.

We were looking for something--almost anything--but we didn't find a thing

except those filing cases.

So we went into one of the rooms to have a look inside the files.

Pancake was disgusted. "There won't be nothing but records in those files.

Probably in a lingo we can't even read."

"There couM be anything inside those files," said Frost.

"They don't have to be records."

Pancake had a sledge and he lifted it to smash one of the files, but I

stopped him. There wasn't any use doing it messy if there was a better way.

We fooled around a while and we found the place where you had to wave your

hand to make a drawer roll out.

The drawer was packed with what looked like sticks of dynamite. They were

about two inches in diameter and a foot, or maybe a little more, in length,

and they were heavy.

"Gold," said Hutch.

"I never saw black gold," Pancake said.

"It isn't gold," I told them.

I was just as glad it wasn't. If it had been, we'd have broken our backs

hauling it away. Gold's all right, but you can't get rich on it. It doesn't

much more than pay wages.

We dumped out a pile of the sticks and squatted on the floor, looking them

over.

"Maybe it's valuable," said Frost, "but I wouldn't know.

What do you think it is ?"

None of us had the least idea.

We found some sort of symbols on each end of the sticks and

;he symbols on each stick seemed to be different, but it didn't aelp us

any because the symbols made no sense.

We kicked the sticks out of the way and opened some more drawers. Every

single drawer was filled with the sticks.

When we came out of the silo, the day had turned into a scorcher. Pancake

climbed the ladder to stack us up some grub and the rest of us sat down in the

shade of the ship and laid several of the sticks out in front of us and sat

there looking at them, wondering what we had.

"That's where we're at a big disadvantage," said Hutch. "If a regular

survey crew stumbled onto this, they'd have all sorts of experts to figure out

the stuff. They'd test it a dozen different ways and they'd skin it alive

almost and they'd have all sorts of ideas and they'd come up with some

educated guesses. And pretty soon, one way or another, they'd know just what

it was and if it was any use."

"Someday," I told them, "if we ever strike it rich, we'll have to hire us

some experts. The kind of loot we're always turning up, we could make good use

of them."

"You won't find any", said Doc, "that would team up with a bunch like us."

"Where do you get 'bunch like us' stuff?" I asked him, a little sore.

"Sure, we ain't got much education and the ship is just sort of glued together

and we don't use any fancy words to cover up the fact that we're in this for

all we can get out of it. But we're doing an honest job."

"I wouldn't call it exactly honest. Sometimes we're inside the law and

sometimes outside it."

That was nonsense and Doc knew it. Mostly where we went, there wasn't any

law.

"Back on Earth, in the early days," I snapped back, "it was folks like us

who went into new lands and ~lazed the trails and found rivers and climbed the

mountains and brought back word to those who stayed at home. And they went

because they were looking for beaver or for gold or slaves or for anything

else that wasn't nailed down tight. They didn't worry much about the law or

the ethics of it and no one blamed them for it.

They found it and they took it and that was the end of it. If they killed

a native or two or burned a village or some other minor thing like that, why,

it was just too bad."

Hutch said to Doc: "There ain't no sense in you going holy on us. Anything

we done, you're in as deep as we are."

"Gentlemen," said Doe, in that hammy way of his, "I wasn't trying to stir

up any ruckus. I was just pointing out that you needn't set your heart on

getting any experts."

"We could get them," I said, "if we offered them enough.

They got to live, just like anybody else."

"They have professional pride, too. That's something you've forgotten."

"We got you."

"We//, now," said Hutch, "I'm not too sure Doc is pro- fessional. That

time he pulled the tooth for me ...."

"Cut it out," I said. "The both of you."

This wasn't any time to bring up the matter of the tooth. Just a couple of

months ago, I'd got it quieted down and I didn't want it breaking out again.

Frost picked up one of the sticks and turned it over and over, looking at

it.

"Maybe we could rig up some tests," he suggested.

"And take the chance of getting blown up ?" asked Hutch.

"It might not go off. You have a better than fifty-fifty chance that it's

not explosive."

"Not me," said Doe. "I'd rather just sit here and guess. It's less tiring

and a good deal safer."

"You don't get anywhere by guessing," protested Frost.

"We might have a fortune right inside our mitts if we could only find out

what these sticks are for. There must be tons of them stored in the building.

And there's nothing in the world to stop us from taking them."

"The first thing", I said, "is to find out if it's explosive. I don't

think it is. It looks like dynamite, but it could be almost anything. For

instance, it might be food."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Clifford D. Simak - Aliens for Neighbors 06 - Jackpot.pdf

共22页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Clifford D. Simak - Aliens for Neighbors 06 - Jackpot

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: