The Mysterious Planet: читать книгу онлайн полностью и бесплатно

With such weapons, many of them quite simple in application, even though the science behind them was unusually complicated, Earth would have a chance to win, and to win as soon as she could turn out enough of the equipment. Earth was well equipped to run almost anything through her complicated factories in a hurry.

There was another angle on it that bothered him, too. He had begun to wonder whether Thule might not have wanted Jakes to steal the plans. It seemed too simple, unless they had deliberately let him walk out with them.

Jakes had pulled stuff from one drawer of a filing cabinet. But Thule must have inventions of military value that would fill a warehouse. These seemed invincible and terrible enough. But they might be rendered harmless against her. She’d had them for a long time, and probably had answers to combat them. She also probably had a great many more weapons about which nobody from the Federation would ever dream.

He hadn’t even guessed that Federation scientists had actually made the proton cannon.

That had been a carefully guarded military secret, and his father hadn’t even told him. How many hitherto unused devices did Thule have?

He had a picture of Federation forces rushing out in full confidence because they were equipped with all the Thulian devices as well as their own, and then finding that none of them would work against Thule. He also had a picture of somebody on Thule who thought war was necessary using the theft of the “secret” weapons as a good excuse to move in before the Federation could build them.

Valin brought up the idea of the broadcasts again, but Bob realized that on this point Jakes was right, and turned it down. He expected pleading, but nothing more was said about it. If this was a major point in the Thulian strategy, they certainly kept their hands concealed well.

That bothered him, too. There was no sign that they ever noticed anything wrong. He couldn’t make up his mind whether he should take them at their face value as polite, considerate and civilized human beings, or whether Jakes was right, and they were completely untrustworthy, masking all their hidden plans to ruin the Solar System by false action, meant only to convince him.

On one point both Jakes and Bob agreed wholeheartedly, and Juan was in violent disagreement. They accepted Valin’s suggestion that they might like some music and had one of the little tape machines delivered, with a few hundred pieces of the most carefully selected music.

It came while they were out. They got back to hear something that was a cross between an anguished cat and a tin can being battered around by a stumble-footed mule. In between sections, for no reason, a female voice would come on in a high, nasal singsong.

If there was any rhythm to it, it couldn’t be found, except for a few sections where there was obviously studied effort to make a pattern.

When they threw the door open and rushed in to shut off the racket, Juan was lying there with a smile of sheer pleasure on his face, beating his hand up and down as crazily as the beat of the so-called music. He let out a squawk when they cut it off.

“Hey, I want to hear all of how it goes,” he cried. “This is interesting music.”

“This,” Jakes stated flatly, “is what happens when a banshee goes crazy. Uh-uh. Not in any place I’m living. Even my Dad couldn’t take that, and he has a tin ear.”

“You probably don’t like your music well separated,” Juan stated. “You like it all mashed together like potatoes in a pot, all going all of the time, oomp-pah-pah, oomp-pah-pah.”

“I don’t know what I like,” Jakes said. “This ain’t it Listen if you like, but not when we’re around.”

Juan looked up appealingly at Bob, but he shook his head firmly.

“The next time we hear this thing, Juan, it goes out in the hall.”

Some people even liked Chinese music, Bob thought. Maybe Juan was one of them. A man’s taste was his own business—but not when he tried to force others to share it.

They found out the next day that there were schools of music, even here. Emo brought down his own favorite tape. Juan fled the room in horror together with Jakes and Bob. Even Valin shook his head sadly as he went in to turn it off. It was a monotonous up and down screeching on a single string, punctuated by sudden loud rumbles that came irregularly enough to be shocking whenever they reached the ears. Emo informed them that it was pure ear-beat, but they didn’t care what he called it

But the incident added some variety to their life, and it was reaching the stage where they needed it. Thule was too well oiled and too smooth. Everything was available for the asking, which made nothing worth bothering with. They had seen the town, and had met all the people they cared to meet

And again, they were simply bored with it all.

The trouble came to Jakes’s attention first. “Aren’t there any female Thulians?” he asked.

Bob thought it over. He hadn’t seen one since they arrived, though there were enough pictures about to show that Thulian girls must have existed once—and rather pretty ones, at that.

Valin answered the question when they put it to him, with the statement they would have expected to hear. “No, the women have not been awakened. When there is war, why bother them. War is for men.”

Bob remembered his mother, who had served eight years as a nurse on one of the ships before she met his father. And he remembered all the other women who were working in the shops on Outpost.

“I thought in a culture as well developed as yours, you’d have complete equality between men and women.”

Valin was horrified. “We’re not barbarians, Bob. We don’t expect our women to fight the way the savages used to. Do you mean to say the Federation has females in its forces?”

“It certainly has. And volunteers too! What would you do if a woman wanted to join your military group?”

“It has happened,” Valin answered slowly. “But we usually cured their minds.”