Leinster, Murray - Checkpoint Lambda

VIP免费

2024-12-13 0 0 365.13KB 65 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Published by arrangement with the author BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, JULY, 1966

BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by

Berkley Publishing Corporation

15 East 26th Street, New York, N.Y. 10010

Berkley Medallion Books® TM 757,375

Printed in the United States of America

CHAPTER 1

Scott ran into the situation on a supposedly almost-routine tour of duty on Checkpoint Lambda. It

was to be his first actual independent command as a 'Space Patrol commissioned officer.

Otherwise the affairs of the galaxy seemed to be proceeding in a completely ordinary fashion. On

a large scale, suns burned in emptiness, novas flamed, and comets went bumbling around their

highly elliptical orbits just as usual. On a lesser scale, where the affairs of men were concerned,

there seemed to be no deviation from the customary. The Golconda Ship had vanished, to be sure,

but it was the habit of that fabulous vessel to disappear once in every four years, while half the

galaxy tried to guess where it had gone, and the rest tried to think of ways to intercept it when it

came back.

Other human activities were commonplace. Huge bulk-cargo carriers lifted off from spaceports

and moved slowly out to emptiness. At appropriate distances the landing grids which had lifted

them let go, and the ungainly objects flickered and abruptly disappeared. Actually, they were on

their way to destinations light-centuries distant, wrapped in cocoons of overdrive-field which

carried them many times faster than light. Sleek, bright metal ships, graceful in outline, shot into

being from nothingness and then swam slowly to the point where the same landing grids' force-

fields could lock on and let them^ down to worlds totally new. Mile-long ships with swimming

pools and hundreds of deck-levels carried cargo and passengers between star clusters, and small,

grubby cargo craft ferried minerals from airless satellites to the planets they circled. Space-yachts

cruised leisure-

ly, while battered tramp ships doggedly nosed into queer corners of space upon their sometimes

legitimate business.

The galaxy was .a very busy place. There was most activity, perhaps, near the yellow sun on whose

third planet humanity had begun and from which it had spread to distances incomprehensibly

immense. But it was busy everywhere.

A space lane stretched from Rigel to Taret, two thousand light-years from one end to the other,

colonized worlds clustered upon it like beads upon, a string. Space lanes led to the Coalsack and from

the Rim to Betelgeuse. Other surveyed lanes forked, then joined, ended, and began once more.

Sometimes they crossed each other. At intervals there were spaceports for the exchange of passengers

and freight between ship lanes. Men displayed great ingenuity in arranging such things.

There was the sun Canis Lambda, for example. Scott was on his way to take command of the

checkpoint that floated in orbit around it. Canis Lambda was a yellow type G sun which should have

had as many planets as ancient Sol. At some unimaginably remote period it had possessed them. But

like Sol, which possessed an unnamed world that blew itself to bits — bits now floating aimlessly

between Mars and Jupiter — Canis Lambda had four now-detonated children, reduced these days

from mountains and islands to particles of celestial sand. None was large enough to be called a planet

and all seemed useless. Yet the sun Canis Lambda burned brightly in emptiness where no less than

six man-marked space lanes crossed each other. And men needed a course-marker, a buoy, a transfer-

point there. So they built one.

The first two attempts were failures, because they were only buoys. They vanished, and the Five

Comets of Canis Lambda were blamed for their disappearance. The current checkpoint was more

ambitious.

Men took an ancient ship that was unsuited for any other use. They drove it to Canis Lambda, took

out the overdrive engine and put it in orbit near a mile-thick fragment of an exploded world. They

installed radars and telemeters and space-radio equipment. Three decks were filled with growing

things to provide food and purify the air. Finished, the former liner was not only a buoy and a

checkpoint for space traffic, but it was a hotel and a warehouse and other things besides.

Scott hadn't seen it when he heard about what he was running into, but he'd studied its plans. It had

freight doors in its hull. It had lifeboats in their blisters. It had air-locks and any number of

conveniences — cabins, a tiny theatre, a restaurant, even a small hospital far down in its stern-most

section. Passengers could board it from a liner following one space lane and wait in it for a liner

following a different lane to take them to another world. Freight could be transferred to it also. The

buoy — the check-point — was a necessary facility for interstellar traffic.

But one day, while Scott was on his way to take it over as his first independent command, several

passengers were there, awaiting a ship for Dettra. They were supposed to transfer. But they didn't.

This started everything, so far as Scott was concerned.

He heard about it in the control room of the liner taking him to the space buoy. The skipper had

checked for passengers to be landed and found that Scott was not only routed for Lambda, but was a

lieutenant in the Soace Patrol and headed for duty there. He was traveling as a paying passenger and

in civilian clothes, as Patrol men always did when off duty. The skipper had assumed he was only

another passenger. But when he realized who Scott was, he urgently invited him into the control

room.

"I'd no idea you were Patrol," he told Scott apolo-

getically, "or I'd have invited you here before."

"I've spent enough time in control rooms," said Scott, "not to mind be|ng just apassenger."

"We don't often see a Patrol man," explained the skipper, "and I didn't think —."

"I'm obliged to you," Scott told him. "I haven't worried about a thing since we left Dettra."

It wasn't quite the truth. Checkpoint Lambda was his first independent command, and he'd been

assigned to it for a very special reason. The whole project would work out best, and he'd seem better

fitted for other commands later, if absolutely nothing unusual happened on Lambda before he got

there, while he was there, and after he left. He'd been uneasy on that account alone but so far

everything seemed normal.

"I may have a problem at Lambda," said the skipper after a pause. "I'm glad you're aboard to take

over if it turns up."

Scott waited. The Patrol was the only interstellar service with authority to order anybody around, but

it leaned over backward to avoid any such behavior.

"Just before we left Dettra," the skipper explained, "a ship came in to the space port. She was minus

some passengers and some freight she should have picked up at Lambda. But at Lambda they insisted

there were no such passengers nor any freight for that ship. They said for her to go on her way. There

was no point in making contact."

Scott frowned. At this particular time it wasn't likely there'd be any confusion about passengers or

freight at Lambda. It was exceedingly important that everything be right. Within the past months one

change in the landing arrangements at Lambda had become necessary. Among Scott's special orders

were directions for him to take care of that change. But this was way out of line.

"One of the passengers was a girl," said the skipper.

"She was bound for Dettra. The liner skipper knew her family. She had to be on Lambda! She had to!

He put up an argument. So the Lambda Patrol officer came on the vision-screen. He swore at the liner

and ordered it on its way. There was some freight to be put off there, too. The Patrol officer refused to

take it. He swore again. He was adamant. So the liner had to go on to Dettra. Her skipper told me

about it arrhour before we lifted off."

Scott didn't swear, but this sort of event at this special place at this particular time had implications

that would have justified much profanity. He said, "And your problem?"

"You," said the skipper uncomfortably. "You're supposed to be landed on Lambda. Before I knew you

were Patrol I was wondering what the devil to do if they refused to accept you! I couldn't think of any

reason —."

"They'll accept me!" Scott assured him. "Don't worry about that! I'm taking command there. And I'll

look into the matter of the passengers and freight." Then he considered for a moment. "I'll ask you to

wait nearby until I've checked things, though. The transfer-passengers might prefer going on with

you, on this ship, to waiting longer on Lambda." The skipper looked relieved but still uneasy. "I

thought it might be — quarantine stuff." "It's not that," said Scott.

He gave no outward sign, but he didn't like this at all. The Golconda Ship was due to land at Lambda

almost as soon as he got there. Refusal to exchange freight or passengers could mean trouble then.

"I'll go aboard," he said casually," and ask you to wait around for half an hour or so. Of course if

there's nothing really the matter, you can forget the whole thing. But passengers shouldn't be staying

aboard when they're scheduled to leave."

The skipper looked relieved. Scott said, "We're due

to break out for Lambda in a couple of hours, aren't we?"

When the skipper -agreed, Scott said casually, "I'll get set for landing,|

He left the control room and went to his cabin. A Patrol man traveled light. There was no great

amount of preparation to make. He did write a brief, specific report of what the skipper had told

him. He didn't need to draw any inferences. Headquarters could put two and two together. But it

would be a long time getting action.

There'd have been no need for a buoy if there were a habitable world within a reasonable

distance. But the next port beyond Lambda was six days' journey in overdrive — many light-

years in normal space. There'd be no Patrol ship at that port. It could be fifteen days or more

before the seemingly innocent news from the checkpoint would reach an operating Patrol base

with an available ship. Then it would be acted on, but it could be thirty days or longer before an

armed ship could be ordered out and arrive at Checkpoint Lambda. Which would be too late. A

tale of passengers not transferring and freight undelivered could mean that the most stupendously

profitable crime in human history was under way.

It could also mean murder on Lambda.

Which was exactly what Scott had special orders to prevent.

He looked at his watch. It was midday mess-time by the liner's clocks. He abruptly found that he

couldn't eat. But he did look into the liner's dining saloon, and eating seemed less possible than

ever. There were families with children. There were honey-mooners. There were elderly people

for whom the discomfort of going into and breaking out of overdrive was distressing in the

extreme. There were young people. None of them had the least imaginable link with the

Golconda Ship, but Scott knew that the

dining-saloon on Lambda might have looked like this not long ago. It wasn't likely that it looked

like this now.

The reason was the Golconda Ship. Ordinary shipments of treasure by space craft were routinely

put under the special protection of the Space Patrol. The transfer of thousands of millions of

credits in interstellar currency happened often enough. In such cases the Patrol made a routine

check of the ship's proposed passengers, made an equally routine check of the crew, and then

briskly examined freight parcels. The checking of individuals would show up anybody with ideas

of traveling as passengers, then seizing the ship in space. Examination of freight would disclose

ambitious people with ideas of stowing away for any similar purpose. Such precautions had

always been enough. But a report of passengers who didn't transfer to their scheduled ship

indicated that something else had happened. To Scott's first independent command. And while he

was on the way to it.

The Golconda Ship's crew hadn't been checked. It wasn't necessary. It came from some place,

nobody-knew-where, with a cargo of treasure its crew had acquired, nobody-knew-how. In

theory, Scott needed only to go to Lambda, take command, and see that when the Golconda Ship

arrived there, there was no trouble with the Five Comets. Recent computations had said there

could be trouble. Then he was to see that its incredibly valuable cargo was divided into shipments

of reasonable size and, in course of time, transferred to a series of other ships which would

deliver each fraction of the whole to a different colonized world. That was all. It was almost

commonplace. But passengers — including a girl — hadn't left the checkpoint when they should.

Freight had been refused. And strangest of all, a supposed Patrol officer had sworn at the skipper

of a merchant ship and ordered him to go on.

There should be no weapons on Lambda to back up a threat. A Patrol officer shouldn't threaten,

anyhow. He was violating all discipline if he used profanity or made threats of any kind to a civilian.

The officer who'd sworn at a liner-skipper didn't sound like a Patrol officer.

Scott very grimly decided that he wasn't.

The Golconda Ship would be the answer. Its fabulous riches and impenetrable mystery made it the

subject of feverish speculation over half the occupied galaxy. Four ships in turn had made voyages to

an unknown destination and returned. A fifth was somewhere out in space now. The first had

appeared from nowhere years ago, with a cargo of treasure that still seemed unbelievable. There'd

been fighting on board, and the first Golconda Ship's crew was smaller than even a small space tramp

should carry. Apparently they'd killed each other off and were down to a skeleton crew which brought

the ship to port. But they kept their lips tight-locked. They had treasure of greater value than any ship

on any space-voyage or any sea had ever brought to port before. But nothing criminal could be

proved against them. Nothing of any use could be learned from them. Ultimately they scattered, every

man a multi-millionaire, and the secret of where they'd obtained their treasure still intact.

Four years later the same men gathered again. They had another ship built. It was a very special ship

indeed. They went aboard and out to sapce. Nobody knew where they went. They were gone six

standard months. They came to port again with even more treasure than before. Again they kept their

mouths shut. Once more they scattered, and every man was a multi-multi-millionaire. The second

Golconda Ship had brought back more wealth than most planetary treasuries contained. And nobody

knew where it was found or how it was gathered or even — actually —

how much there was of it. But the sudden excess of riches caused a financial crisis on the world

where they landed it.

A third Golconda Ship and a fourth had made voyages, each time with a crew whose every member

was so many times a millionaire that an estimate of his wealth was meaningless. Now a fifth

Golconda Ship was due, to make them richer still. But this time it would not make port where an

embarrassment of riches would cause a financial panic. It would land at Lambda.

And this was why a few non-transferring passengers and a threatening Patrol officer on Lambda made

Scott feel grim and savage and alost helpless as he watched the diners in this space liner's dining

saloon.

They were innocent bystanders. Their lives shouldn't be endangered. If this liner made freight or

passenger-transfer contact with Lambda, they would be in trouble — if things were as wrong as they

appeared. He, Scott, would have to arrange matters so that he took all the risks. And, acting alone, the

risk would be practically suicidal.

He was about to move away from the doorway when loudspeakers all over the ship blared,

chorus; "Attention all passengers! Attention all passengers! Breakout from overdrive coming!

Breakout from overdrive coming!"

There were unhappy sounds here and there. Overdrive was the only conceivable way by which space

traffic could be moved across light-centuries of space. But ways to mitigate the physical discomfort

of going into or out of it had not been developed successfully.

"This is a checkpoint breakout, at Checkpoint Lambda," the voice said cheerfully. "// you wish,

stewards will provide you with anti-malaise pills to reduce breakout discomfort. We are required

by law to report our passage past the checkpoints set up along the space lanes we follow. Usually

that is all that hap-

pens. Today, though, we have a passenger to transfer by tenacle to the buoy Lambda. It will be

interesting ! to watch. This checkpoint buoy was formerly a crack [ interstellar liner. In its day —" \

Scott moved tiff to the control room as the brisk voice described the former liner now floating as

a hulk in emptiness. It was still equipped with the solar system drive-engines which could shift its

position about the local sun, but they could not conceivably drive it to any other solar system.

Here it was, and here it must remain, depending on passing ships for its contacts with the rest of

the galaxy. The voice mentioned antennas and radar-mirrors and telemetering equipment as if

they were strange. It pictured the transfer of a passenger by space tentacle as an operation of vast

interest. Scott reached the control room and heard a mate off to one side completing the

saccharine speech into a microphone. The skipper nodded a greeting. He looked uneasy. Every,

skipper worried about breakout. There was no authenticated record of a ship breaking out to

collide immediately with a planet or asteroid or a sun's blazing photosphere, but a ship did come

back to normal space almost at random.

A voice from overhead in the control room said with careful distinctness, "When the gong

sounds, breakout will be exactly in five seconds."

There was a slow, monotonous tick-tock-tick-tock. It lasted an interminable time. Then a

recorded gong sounded, and the same carefully distinct voice said, "Five-four-three-two-one —"

The vision-screens flickered. Everybody on the liner felt a ghastly dizziness, and the sensations

of a spinning, spiral fall. Then there was nausea, quick and sharp and revolting, but mercifully it

lasted only a heartbeat.

Then the screens blazed with light. A thousand million specks of brightness glittered upon the

formerly

rust-red screens. A tinny voice said, "Checkpoint Lambda. Checkpoint Lambda. Report. Report,"

and a tiny whining sound began to come from the liner's automatically taped log which was now

broadcasting in a high-speed transmission for the checkpoint to record. The Milky Way sprawled

across no less than four vision-screens, and the distorted black nebula, the Coalsack, loomed

large and near. It was of another shape than when seen from Earth. To the left, and ahead, a

bright yellow sun with a barely perceptible disk shone luridly. There were peculiar luminosities

close by. They would be the Five Comets of Canis Lambda; matters of interest to professional

astronomers but not usually to anybody else. Scott, though, regarded them with a frown. The

liner's skipper shook his head.

"Good that we broke out short," he observed. "I'd hate to come out of overdrive close to them!"

Scott said nothing. All overdrive runs were timed to stop short of their destination, with shorter

jumps to closer approximation. The odds against collisions on breakout were enormous, and

research expeditions had actually penetrated the hearts of those clumped meteoric hordes which

were cometary heads and nuclei. But that was a hair-raising trick, and possible only by the most

tedious and painstaking matching of velocities. One definitely wouldn't want to break out inside a

comet. And meteor-streams trailed most of them. The Five Comets of Canis Lambda were

particularly undesirable close neighbors for space craft. Two robot checkpoints in succession had

vanished from orbit around this sun. Still, most ships merely reported their passage there and

went on to the infinite emptiness beyond.

"Umph," said the skipper. "We'll go on in."

The operation of approaching a landing was much more complicated on a liner than on a Patrol

ship. There was verification of the ecliptic plane. There was

careful measurement of distance. Micrometric adjustment of the short-jump relay. A man couldn't

time an overdrive jump to Jess than the fiftieth of a second. A properly timed relay could split a fifty-

thousandth. The figures were checked, and checked again, and the settings made and verified. All the

while the ceiling speaker continued to repeat metallically, "Checkpoint Lambda. Checkpoint Lambda.

Report. Report." The call had been traveling at the speed of light for almost an hour before the liiier

picked it up from the yet unseen and unseeable space buoy. The liner's automatic reply was now

traveling back to it. But the ship itself would get there before its broadcast.

Another warning to passengers. A gong. A countdown. Then there was dizziness once more, and the

feeling of falling, and intolerable nausea. The screens flickered and rearranged the innumerable

specks of light which were stars. And then, suddenly, the sun Canis Lambda was blindingly bright

with a disk half-a-degree across, and the call from the ceiling speaker became a shout for the fraction

of a syllable before the automatic volume-control cut it down.

The skipper looked pleased. One does not often have a chance to show off before a Patrol man. He

watched complacently, giving no orders, while the direction of the checkpoint signal was ascertained

and its distance measured. Then the liner began to drive toward it on that slow solar system drive by

which men first explored the planets of the First System. It was necessary for lift-offs and landings.

But Scott stared ahead. The Five Comets were heading in toward the sun; five separate luminosities,

some larger and some smaller, some with enormous trailing tails and others with lesser ones. All were

concentrated in one very small region of the sky.

Scott didn't like the look of things, but unless he knew their distance he couldn't tell how close

together they really were. Even then, distances in space were

not easily realized. There was no believable sensation of depth where astronomical objects were

concerned. Everything looked flat. It was impossible to see more than angular relationships. Actual

distances were no more than numerals on paper. But still Scott didn't like what he saw.

"Very nice work," he said politely. "I'll go get into my vacuum-suit. I'll be back by the time you've

raised the buoy."

He went back to his cabin and changed his civilian clothes for his uniform. He put on the Patrol space

suit that was so much less bulky than the vacuum equipment used on merchant ships. It took a

considerable tune. Then he picked up the report he'd prepared and returned to the control room. The

skipper was red-faced and angry and apprehensive.

"Look here!" he greeted Scott indignantly. "They got our approach-call. They said, 'What ship's that?'

When I told them they didn't answer! They don't answer now!"

As if deliberately to contradict him, the communicator-speaker said harshly. "There is nothing to

come aboard you. No freight or passengers will be accepted. Proceed on your voyage. Message

ends."

The skipper looked at Scott.

"What am I to do?"

"Proceed on your voyage," said Scott drily," as far as the space buoy." He hesitated a moment, then

said, "As an extreme precaution, put a man by the overdrive button. Set it up to move the ship a short

jump away — if they get too insistent."

The skipper gave orders. Even a brief period in overdrive would put the liner beyond this solar

system. Up to now, the skipper had been concerned only because he had a passenger who might be

refused by Lambda. There was no precedent to tell him what to do. But Scott had asked for a

precaution which made it more than mere irregularity on the part of the

checkpoint. There was more wrong here than passengers who didn't change ship and freight that

wasn't accepted. Scott had come to that conclusion earlier. The skipper said uncomfortably, "I don't

understand this!"

Scott replied, "Presently, you will."

To him the situation was self-evident. The Golcon-da Ship was coming back from wherever it had

gone on its fifth treasure-hunting voyage. It was going to make port at Checkpoint Lambda instead of

a normal space port. It planned to distribute its riches among the financial institutions of a dozen or a

hundred worlds instead of one. It was a very sound idea provided that the secret of its intention —

which even now Scott didn't feel he could reveal — and the time of its arrival remained unknown to

anybody but the commanding officer of Checkpoint Lambda, until after the operation was over.

But that apparently hadn't happened.

Taking into consideration a leak in highly classified information, and the report about the passengers

for another liner, and now the insistence that this liner should go on without attempting further

communication, Scott could have written a very plausible outline of events and conditions on the

checkpoint.

Someone who knew where the Golconda Ship would reappear could have organized what could be

the most profitable criminal enterprise in human history. Men could have taken passage from various

worlds to Lambda, there to wait for transportation elsewhere. Other men from other worlds could

arrive to add to their number. Then, suddenly and without warning, the pseudo-passengers could act.

It could be swift and terrible. They'd take the soace buoy, perhaps with crackling blasters. They might

capture and imprison the crew and the authentic passengers. On the other hand, they might not take

that risk.

In any event, if that had happened, the present oc-

cupants of Lambda would be waiting for the Golconda Ship to arrive and to link to the buoy for

heavy-freight transfer. Then there would be swift and terrible action. It was unlikely that anybody on

the Golconda Ship would survive. And then the captors of that ship would sail away with wealth so

vast that divide it as they might, no one of them would ever be less than fabulously rich.

All this was inference. Only Scott suspected it, and there was no Patrol ship which could be

summoned and arrive there within weeks. Scott could make a part of the crime impossible. But there

were the Five Comets. If any part of the crew, or anyone listed on the passenger list was still alive it

would in effect be murder unless he went aboard and attempted the impossible. He had to prevent

their deaths, if they hadn't already been murdered. The fact that even the attempt would mean that he

might be killed couldn't alter the fact that he had a clear obligation.

But all this was still deduction, even though the facts allowed of no other interpretation. Scott was

wrily contemplating the total problem when the communicator-speaker rasped, "What the devil are

you doing? There's nothing to go aboard you and nothing will be received. Get on course and go

away!" ~ Somehow the voice sounded like someone speaking correctly against his usual habit — in

order to seem something he was not.

Scott went to the transmitter. He said formally, "Calling Checkpoint Lambda. This is Lieutenant

Scott, Space Patrol. I have orders to take command of the checkpoint. I am coming aboard. You will

prepare to receive me. Message ends."

There was an indefinable sound, as if someone had uttered a choked exclamation. Then silence. Scott

knew what was happening, of course. There was a conference, on the buoy. To decide what to do

about him. Scott moved the microphone to one side and

said in an official voice, "Captain, if there is difficulty here I shall commandeer this ship by Space

Patrol authority to stand off this checkpoint and warn all other ships of suspicious actions aboard and

not to make contact with it. We will request that all ships report the situation to the Space Patrol."

The skipper of the liner gaped at him. Scott pointed to the microphone close to his lips. The sound of

his voice would have changed as he spoke to the skipper, but he'd have been overheard. They've have

heard him on the buoy. He could actually have done what he'd just mentioned. But there were the

Five Comets. And also there was an unwritten rule in the Patrol that a Patrol man never waited for

help, though he might send for it. In the long run, it paid off.

He put the microphone aside. "Keep a man at the overdrive button," he said, frowning. "If anything

leaves Lambda headed for this ship, he'd better push it. I don't intend to keep you here, of course. It

wouldn't be practical. But I don't like this!"

The skipper opened his mouth to ask a question, but a duty-man across the control room said, "I've

got the buoy, sir."

A vision-screen faded out and brightened again with a relayed telescopic image. It showed first a

monstrous, glittering mass of unoxidized metal that was a fragment of one of the planets Canis

Lambda had lost aeons ago. They'd blown themselves to bits like the fifth planet in the First System.

Now it was an asteroid, too small to be called a planet or to have an atmosphere or to be of any use

except the one that was made of it. It was a marker. Its orbit around the sun was nearly circular and

could be computed with precision. And the buoy stayed close to it. Ships seeking the former liner,

now a freight station and hotel, could know exactly where to find it in the three-hundred-million-mile

orbit the checkpoint followed. The buoy would, quite simply, be where computation

placed the marker. And that was known and printed for every imaginable month, day, and hour far

into the future.

It loomed large as the magnification on the screen increased. A twinkling speck appeared beside it.

Scott stared and shook his head. The Five Comets on the way, and the buoy not moved to safety?

Even criminals . . . But then his lips tensed. Things looked worse than he'd supposed.

The buoy was — had been — a ship not unlike the one Scott was on. Now it sprouted radio and radar

and telemetering equipment seemingly by the hundreds of pieces. By the size of the ship, Scott could

now guess distances. The glittering marker-asteroid was about two miles from the buoy. They floated

in the same orbit, very near each other. More magnified now, peculiar ringed depressions appeared in

the' substance of the marker. They were craters, like those found on the inner moons and Mars and

Mercury in the First System. They were impact-craters from bombardment of the asteroid by rocky

masses hurtling through the sky. They were evidence that space wasn't always empty where the

checkpoint floated. Two robot checkpoints had vanished from their orbits here, and astronomers

blamed the Five Comets and pointed to the impact-craters as proof that they were the cause.

Scott turned his head. There were the vaguely circular patches of brightness against the stars. They

were the Comets, on schedule. Their orbits were commensurable, and every so often they reached

aphelion all together. This was such an occasion. It had been known for a long time, but the buoy was

ignoring it. It floated obliviously in space, some tens of times its own length from its marker-

asterioid.

"I'll go down to the air-lock," said Scott. "Keep your man on the overdrive button. After I'm aboard,

wait nearby until I release you or at least until half an

hour has passed. And —" he passed over his written report —" see that this gets to a Patrol office as

soon as possible.

He went down to the air-lock. Liner crewmen waited to let him out. Merchant ships carried many

more men than did comparable Patrol ships. They operated more elaborately. Quite unnecessarily

now, they checked the tuning of his suit to communicator-frequency to make sure he'd overhear all

talk between the liner and Lambda, and that he could take part in it.

For a long, long time there was nothing. He heard small sounds from someplace where a microphone

was open. Then a voice in his helmet-phones said ungraciously, "We'll receive Lieutenant Scott. Put

him in a space suit. We'll send over a tentacle for him."

The liner skipper's voice came through the same headohones in Scott's helmet.

"He's on his way to the air-lock."

Scott watched the small monitor screen in the airlock wall. Its function was to show the immediate

outside of the lock, to facilitate emergency operations of any kind. At first Scott could only see a

shining field of stars. Then slowly the glittering metal object which was the space buoy seemed to

creep past the edge of the screen and into plain view. Its steel hull was coated with that golden plating

which old-style overdrive fields required of ships they transported. There were ports along the fish-

shaped flanks. There were cargo doors. There were lesser doors which would be personnel air-locks.

And there were jungles of antennae for communication and meteor-watch and telemetry at different

spots.

Scott's eyes fixed themselves on an open air-lock door. It could be nothing deadlier than a door

already opened for him to enter. But a short-range rocket could issue from it, if any had been shipped

to the buoy as freight.

The star-field moved. The liner was shifting position. It changed its angle to the buoy until, if there

were a missile in that open lock, it would no longer bear on the liner. It implied an informed

uneasiness on the part of the liner's skipper. Scott took time out to approve of him.

"Here comes our tentacle," said the grating voice.

Something slender and worm-like came out of an opening. It writhed and straightened, quivered, and

continued to extend itself. It came fumbling across the emptiness between the two ships. Scott closed

the inner lock door. He felt his formerly flacid vacuum-suit swell out swiftly. He saw the air pressure

gauge needle swing to zero. A flickering yellow light told him that he might open the outer lock-door.

He opened it.

It was not a new experience to look out upon infinite nothingness. The liner's artificial gravity made

the bow of the ship seem up and the stern down. But he felt that he stood on an unguarded threshold

with pure abyss before him. Some hundreds of yards away the space buoy moved very slowly past.

That was stability. The liner was stability. But in between lay such a gulf that all his instincts warned

him shrink away.

He grew angry, as he always did when he felt weakness in himself. He watched the wobbling tentacle

as it groped toward him. It was not like an inanimate thing at all, but it gave an appalling impression

of stupidity and of bumbling ineptitude. It reached the liner's air-lock.

Scott hooked his belt to it. It began to retract. It pulled him out of the air-lock. He ground his teeth as

he felt emptiness below him — when he knew that he could fall for thousands and thousands of years

and never reach anything at all.

The harsh voice said, "You can go now. He's on the way."

As if in response, the liner surged ahead. At high acceleration it darted away from the space- buoy. It

dwindled...

The tentacle ceased to draw Scott toward the buoy. It held him still in the void. Then it stirred as if

impatiently. But the liner was still within space-suit communicator range. When it disappeared in

overdrive, though, something would happen. The tentacle could thrust Scott away to its own fullest

extension with such violence that when it stopped he'd be snapped off its end to go floating away in

emptiness forever. Or it could draw back, pulling him toward the buoy's metal hull with such velocity

that he'd crash against the hull-plates, bursting his suit and helmet, turning into a horrible bubbling

thing as his blood and tissues changed to steam in emptiness. 'All things considered, those appeared to

be the alternatives as soon as the liner went into overdrive.

Scott inconspicuously unhooked his belt. He held onto the tentacle with a space-gloved hand. He'd

made a third alternative possible. The tentacle could extend furiously or retract furiously. But he'd be

left floating a few hundred yards from Lambda, with a reaction-jet for propulsion as he tried to fight

his way inside.

This last, rather than the others, was what he actually expected.

CHAPTER 2

But the liner checked its motion. It stopped some five miles away, where it was merely a silver

splinter in space, far beyond the mile-thick asteroid with the impact-craters on its surface. The

skipper's voice came, dourly, "We'll watch him over."

Then Scott said measuredly, "I left orders with the

liner's skipper, you know."

He held on to the tentacle while his fate was debated. He heard the faintest possible sounds. A

microphone was open somewhere. There was argument. He heard voices.

". . . crazy fool! He'll . . ." ". . . that liner . . ." "... told you to take . . ." ". .. what's wrong with . . ." ". .

. he can't do anything . . ." Then a sneering," . . . nice company for Janet . . ." And then an

authoritative" . . . Bring him aboard. Then we'll decide . . ."

Scott clung to the end of the tentacle. The liner floated in space, miles away. Her skipper would be

watching, of course, and he was showing a sudden per-ceptiveness. He'd moved the liner. Sound

thinking. He wasn't trying to communicate with Scott. Proper behavior — leaving the conduct of this

affair to a Patrol man. With a man ready to throw the liner into overdrive, it was safe from destruction

by — say — a rocket missile, if any had been gotten to the buoy in the guise of freight. But anything

that looked suspicious or unusual would send the liner away, for the sake of her passengers. Anything

causing alarm on the liner would be distinctly unwise. Anything causing the liner to linger near the

buoy, on orders from Scott with the authority of the Patrol behind him, could be disastrous to an

illegal enterprise, because if the Gol-conda ship appeared and found itself not alone at the checkpoint,

it would be very cagey toward both the buoy and the liner. So nobody on the buoy wanted the liner to

be dissatisfied.

Scott held on to the tentacle. It began to retract once more. Now it drew him smoothly and steadily

toward Checkpoint Lambda. That golden-colored object grew larger, became huge, turned monstrous.

Its welded outer hull-surface was very near . ..

Scott's magnetic shoe-soles touched and clung with that peculiar sticky adhesion which never felt

really dependable. He released the tentacle, which went into

its small hole in the electroplated metal of the buoy's hull. There was a door there, which did not

open. Scott was isolated on the outer skin of what once had been a liner of some thousands of

tons capacity. He waited. The scarred and pitted asteroid-fragment seemed overhead. It looked as

if it should be falling upon Scott, to crush him. But Scott was accustomed to that sort of illusion.

He waited to be admitted. He guessed grimly that either much preparation for his reception was

going on, or else that the buoy waited for the liner to go away.

Presently he said in a bored voice, "I'm waiting to come in a lock."

His tone was the kind that already-disturbed men halfway through a crime would not be ready

for. It didn't match the situation. They should be uneasy, not knowing whether he knew anything

or had guessed everything. A bored tone didn't fit! Criminals in an act of law-breaking could be

baffled. They might be uneasy.

They were. There was a delay of perhaps three-quarters of a minute. Then there were clankings,

reaching the air in Scott's space suit through his metal soles. A lock-door swung out and open.

Scott went unhurriedly to it. He entered, and the sudden tug of artificial gravity restored

sensations of up and down. He very matter-of-factly closed the outer door. He felt his suit go

limp as air came in. He opened the inner lock-door and walked out of the lock into the ship-

turned-space buoy.

There was nobody to greet him. There was no one in sight at all. He heard faint music — Thallian

mood-music. He stood still for a moment, awaiting challenge. Then he shrugged and got out of

his space suit. He put it on a chair, tugged his uniform into shape, and walked briskly ahead. He

knew, of course, that he was watched; if not directly, then by closed-circuit viewers set up

somewhere.

He headed for the control room. It was the one part of the ship officially occupied by Patrol

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

摘要：

COPYRIGHT©1966,BYMURRAYLEINSTERPublishedbyarrangementwiththeauthorBERKLEYMEDALLIONEDITION,JULY,1966BERKLEYMEDALLIONBOOKSarepublishedbyBerkleyPublishingCorporation15East26thStreet,NewYork,N.Y.10010BerkleyMedallionBooks®TM757,375PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmericaCHAPTER1Scottranintothesituationonasuppo...

展开>> 收起<<

Leinster, Murray - Checkpoint Lambda.pdf

共65页,预览13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！

Leinster, Murray - Checkpoint Lambda

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: